A Feature-Based Coding Algorithm for Face Image

Abstract

Face images have great significance in machine vision field especially like face recognition and tracking. Considering the similarity of face images, this paper proposes a face image coding scheme based on Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptor. The SIFT descriptor, which is a kind of local feature descriptor, characterizes an image region invariant to scale and rotation. The facial features are combined with the SIFT descriptor to make use of the external image contents to improve the coding efficiency in this paper. We segment an image into certain regions according to the facial features and get SIFT features in these regions. Then the SIFT features are used to find the corresponding patches from a large-scale face image database. Experimental results show that the proposed image coding method provides a better visual quality of reconstructed images than the intra-frame coding in HEVC under the similar compression ratio.