Efficient image coding for access to pixel ranges

摘要

Technical imaging applications such as coding "images" of digital elevation maps, require extracting regions of compressed images with the pixel values within a pre-defined range, without having to decompress the whole image. Previously, we introduced a class of nonlinear transforms which are small modifications of linear transforms to facilitate a search for the regions with pixel values below (above) a given 'threshold', without incurring any penalty in coding efficiency. However, coding efficiency had to be somewhat compromised when searching for regions with a given pixel 'range', especially at high coding rates. In this paper, we propose an improved method of pixel 'range' coding to deal with the aforementioned problem. Results show significant improvements in coding efficiency.