Operationally optimal vertex-based shape coding with arbitrary direction edge encoding structures

Abstract

The intention of shape coding in the MPEG-4 is to improve the coding efficiency as well as to facilitate the object-oriented applications, such as shape-based object recognition and retrieval. These require both efficient shape compression and effective shape description. Although these two issues have been intensively investigated in data compression and pattern recognition fields separately, it remains an open problem when both objectives need to be considered together. To achieve high coding gain, the operational rate-distortion optimal framework can be applied, but the direction restriction of the traditional eight-direction edge encoding structure reduces its compression efficiency and description effectiveness. We present two arbitrary direction edge encoding structures to relax this direction restriction. They consist of a sector number, a short component, and a long component, which represent both the direction and the magnitude information of an encoding edge. Experiments on both shape coding and hand gesture recognition validate that our structures can reduce a large number of encoding vertices and save up to 48.9% bits. Besides, the object contours are effectively described and suitable for the object-oriented applications. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. (DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.23.4.043009)