Lossy Compression through Fast Extraction of Object-of-Interest on Low Depth-of-Field images

The popularity of multimedia applications has resulted in development of lossless and lossy compression techniques.  This paper presents a novel lossy compression scheme for the Low Depth-of-Field (DOF) images where the quality factor is altered based on whether we are compressing object-of-interest (OOI) or the background. Low DOF is a popular photographic technique which enables the representation of the photographer’s intention by giving a clear focus only on an object of interest (OOI). We first describe a fast and efficient scheme for extracting OOIs from individual low-DOF images and then apply the lossy compression scheme with different quality factor on it.  The proposed system does not require any user assistance to determine the initial OOI.  The experimental results shows that the proposed method performs well in compressing the given image (higher compression ratio), at the same time maintaining the acceptable quality (high PSNR) and reduce the complexity.