Recent advances in object-based image compression

Summary form only given. Image compression has progressed from pixel-level entropy coding to transform coding applied to fixed regions (e.g., JPEG-2K with rectangular blocks). Our interest is in substitutions applied to arbitrarily-shaped regions. For example, object-based compression (OBC) segments disjoint, contiguous image regions, and compactly approximates each region´s boundary and content (e.g., represented by a codebook exemplar). When region boundaries closely approximate scene object boundaries, OBC resembles object recognition. Disadvantages include cost of segmentation and region boundary representation, and pixel- or object-level distortion in the decompressed image.