Selective enhancement of contrast blocks for MPEG/JPEG image compression

Abstract

In our work, we introduce the block significance measure reflecting the property of the blocks to be shared by pixels from different image regions. The blocks B with higher significance value C(B) belong to the fields of region contrast and thus tend to attract more attention in terms of the Human Visual System (HVS). The computation of C(B) is based on the execution of a region merging procedure and determination of the first partitioning containing a region completely covering a block B. The introduced measure is related to the flat/texture/edge block classification but reflects global image properties and differs from the latter. We study how one may incorporate the measure in the DCT-based based image/video compression. Experimental results are presented.