Region of interest coding for image compression

This paper presents a new method for region of interest (ROI) coding based on the embedded block coding with optimized truncation (EBCOT) paradigm. The proposed method reduces the priority of the less important region or background of an image, allowing the user to quickly view the ROI with higher quality without receiving the entire image. Thus, it substantially saves the transmission time, storage space, and computational cost of image compression. The unique characteristics of the new method lie in the combination of good ROI compression performance and low algorithm complexity. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous ROI coding schemes in overall ROI coding performance.