title: Low bit-rate compression of facial images.
abstract: An efficient approach for face compression is introduced. Restricting a family of images to frontal facial mug shots enables us to first geometrically deform a given face into a canonical form in which the same facial features are mapped to the same spatial locations. Next, we break the image into tiles and model each image tile in a compact manner. Modeling the tile content relies on clustering the same tile location at many training images. A tree of vector-quantization dictionaries is constructed per location, and lossy compression is achieved using bit-allocation according to the significance of a tile. Repeating this modeling/coding scheme over several scales, the resulting multiscale algorithm is demonstrated to compress facial images at very low bit rates while keeping high visual qualities, outperforming JPEG-2000 performance significantly.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Elad
authors.forename: Roman
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Goldenberg
authors.forename: Ron
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kimmel
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D001699:Biometry / Q000379:methods*; D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D044962:Data Compression / Q000379:methods*; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted