• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.10a
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• pp.915-918
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• 1998

Region based coding consistsof image segmentation contour and texture coding. Contour coding techniques can be classified into contour or shape-oriented approaches. In this paper, geodesic skeleton based on shape-oriented approach is used for contour coding. Efficient application of geodesic skeleton for contour coding based on the characteristics of regions in segmented image will be discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 1996.06b
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• pp.61-66
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• 1996

In this paper, an efficient contour coding algorithm incorporating polygonal approximation and discrete sine transform is introduced. Contour information is inevitable in content based coding, and polygonal approximation method is widely used to compress the contour information. However polygonal approximation method is not suitable when fine contour is needed. We show that the error signal of polygonal approximation can be efficiently represented using DST, that is, the contour information can be represented accurately with polygons and DST coefficients. With this contour coding scheme, the required bits to represent a contour can be reduced by about 40-50% with virtually no degradation compared to the existing chain coding method.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.25 no.12
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• pp.1677-1685
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• 1988

In this paper, a new contour coding algorithm is investigated for use in region based image coding. Generally the contour data may be encoded by its chain codes or chain difference codes. But the data compression efficiency is low because of heavy burden for initial absolute coordinates of each chain. To alleviate this problem, the depth first search in graph traversal algorithm, is applied to the chain difference coding method. The proposed coding scheme is shown to be very efficient for contour images obtained by split-merge segmentation. Finally, we can reuce data about 60% in comparison with modified chain difference coding.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.35S no.11
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• pp.152-165
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• 1998

The contour coding usually occupies the biggest part in the encoded bitstream, which causes the bottleneck problem of a region-based coding scheme. In this paper, new adaptive contour coding technique is proposed for the segmentation-based image coding. By adaptive contour coding considering contrast of neighbor regions in the proposed method, the overall bitrate can be significantly reduced without loss of the subjective image quality. After segmentation using watershed algorithm to the image, the contour segments are classified according to the contrast of the adjacent regions. Then, the contour segments between classified low contrast regions are highly compressed using morphological low pass filtering. The needed bits for encoding the contour information is reduced without loss of subjective image quality in the experiment.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 1996.06a
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• pp.195-198
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• 1996

In this paper, we introduce the notion of the smoothly perfect 8-connected (SP8C) contour and propose a coding technique for the SP8C contours. Based on the contour simplification using the majority filter proposed by Gu[6], SP8C contours are extracted on the contour lattice from the segmented image. By noting that, unlike the perfect 8-connected contours, the SP8C contours are restricted to travel in only 3 different directions along the contours, we also propose two techniques for encoding the SP8C contours. The one is the modified version of the neighbouring direction segment coding by Kandeko[2], while the other is to employ the notion of the entropy coding. From the comparison in terms of the entropy, it is shown that the proposed SP8C contours require les bits in encoding the diagonal contours than the 4-connected contours employed by Gu. And computer simulations reveal that the contours can be efficiently encoded by the proposed technique.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.1178-1184
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• 1997

Encoding of segment contours is a critical part of a region-based coding system especially at low bit rates where the contour information occupies a majority of the bit rate. When approximating contours with polygons, a fixed upper bound on the distortion is set for the approximation process. Instead of using this fixed bound, adaptive approximation bound for a lossy coding of contourts is proposed in this paper. A function representing the relative importance of the contour segmentis defined to take into account the spatial content of the image. By using this function, the contour can be approximated adaptively. This allows a more general approach than the methods with the fixed distortion measure. The effectiveness of the adaptive contour coding approach is verified through experiments.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.31B no.1
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• pp.72-80
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• 1994

In this paper, a new variable block-size transform coding algorithm using information of segmentation is proposed. In general variable block-size transform coding algorithms, the information which is used to form variable blocks is thrown away, but in the proposed algorithm, the information of segmentation which is composed of texture and contour information is maintained for efficient coding. That is, the number of blocks can be reduced by contour information, a DC component of block can be predicted by texture information, and the region compensation, which reduces mean difference between regions, using texture and contour information can diminish the magnitude of AC components. The result is that the proposed algorithm has improved highly the coding efficiency of DC and AC components.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.35-43
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• 1996

In this paper, we present efficient six-connected contour coding algorithms which can uniquely reconstruct any contour image and efficiently compress the contour data. We first design chain difference codes using two onward direction states, based on the fact that the probability distribution of the direction vectors of horiwntal/vertical direction state is different from that of the direction vectors of diagonal direction state. In order to increase coding efficiency, we also design chain difference codes using five states which are classified according to current and previous onward direction vectors. In addition, we also remove the END codeword to reduce total codeword occurrency. Experimental results show that when using 2 states and 5 states without END codeword total entropy decreases by about 12% and 14% for real images and by about 10% and 26% for a synthetic image, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.6
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• pp.114-123
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• 2003

The current paper proposes a new vertex selection scheme for polygon-based contour coding. To efficiently characterize the shape of an object, we incorporate the curvature information in addition to the conventional maximum distance criterion in vertex selection process. The proposed method consists of "two-step procedure." At first, contour pixels of high curvature value are selected as key vortices based on the curvature scale space (CSS), thereby dividing an overall contour into several contour-segments. Each segment is considered as an open contour whose end points are two consecutive key vortices and is processed independently. In the second step, vertices for each contour segment are selected using progressive vertex selection (PVS) method in order to obtain minimum number of vertices under the given maximum distance criterion ( $D_{max}$$^{*}$). Furthermore, the obtained vortices are adjusted using the dynamic programming (DP) technique to optimal positions in the error area sense. Experimental results are presented to compare the approximation performances of the proposed and conventional methods.imation performances of the proposed and conventional methods.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.432-443
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• 1997

This paper presents contour simplification method and a regional hierarchical segmentation algorithm based on PSNR for the transmission of image in mobile communication, of which available bandwidth is very limited. It first takes into account the global information and produces a coarse segmentation, that is, with a small number of regions. Then, each segmented region has different quality. Thus, the region with low quality is selected by PSNR and improved by introducing regions corresponding to more local information. It is able to improve the subjective quality of image and reduce contour information. In addition, contour simplification method is proposed for the efficient lossless chain coding. The proposed method can be applied to the applications such as mobile communications and videotelephone through PSTN, of which the available transmission bandwidth is very limited.