Video compression by means of singularity maps of human vision system
Harold H Szu · 2003
An efficient video compression mechanism is presented, that preserves not only the visual acuity but also the perception fidelity. This is possible because we have made novel utilization of the human vision system (HVS), since our eyes do not pay attention to image pixels rather to intensity changes. We furthermore label the discontinuity of the intensity with the derivative jump value across the boundary as the finger print of the edge, and that label together with its actual gray scale value are called the singularity map (SM) that enables us uniquely identify those corresponding control points among neighborhood frames without the usual exhaustive search at all image pixels level. The proposed video compression consists of two parallel operations: (1) sending the lossy compression of full image by the HVS wavelets without the block artifact of DCT of JPEG or MPEG; and (2) inserting the original gray scale edge preserved by the SM before the lossy compression operation. The approach enables one to transmit live video via the SINGARS radio at a narrow bandwidth of 16 K bps.