Domain-Specific Video Compression for Long-Term Archiving of Endoscopic Surgery Videos

Common lossy video compression methods have already reached a very high performance level and are about to reach their natural limit. However, their compression efficiency is still insufficient for certain domains where a plethora of video data should be archived. One example is the domain of medical endoscopy where entire surgeries are recorded for documentation with high visual quality because it is not possible to anticipate if and when exceptional situations may happen. Eventually, only a fraction of the video footage is of actual relevance for post-operative review. In this paper, we introduce the concept of domain-specific video compression by the example of this very specific domain. We identify several characteristics of endoscopic surgery videos that can be exploited by content-based analysis algorithms to achieve a significantly higher compression efficiency than in current practice. The extensive evaluation shows that the proposed methods massively reduce the data volume without any semantic information loss and thus allow for long-term video archiving of endoscopic surgery videos. Moreover, we expect to stimulate future research in this challenging new field.