Region of interest coding applied to map overlapping in Geographic Information Systems

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) applications are becoming an important issue for the territorial management, governmental and research projects, and for many fields of our society. A characteristic of such applications is the displaying of successive layers of information that, in some cases, may overlap areas of the displayed images that are eventually never showed to the final user of the application. Even though these overlapped areas are of null interest, the coding of these images considers the complete area of the image, and thus the coding performance of the compression system is penalized. This paper introduces a novel use of the Region Of Interest (ROI) coding techniques to overcome the drawbacks of the map overlapping in GIS and RS applications. The proposed approach is based on a ROI coding method defined for the JPEG2000 standard that efficiently improves the coding performance and keeps JPEG2000 compliance.