Visual pattern image sequence coding

Visual pattern image sequence coding (VPISC) is a new digital image sequence (video) coding process that possesses significant advantages relative to other technologies; in particular, it is extremely efficient in terms of the computational effort required. It is designed to exploit properties of the human visual system (HVS), and thus yields high visual fidelity. Visual quality criteria are deliberately chosen over information-theoretic ones on the grounds that, in images intended for human viewing, visual criteria are the most meaningful ones. VPISC yields impressive compression comparable to other recent methods, such as motion-compensated vector quantization. VPISC divides the images into spatiotemporal cubes, which are then independently matched with one of a small, predetermined set of visually meaningful three-dimensional space-time patterns. The pattern set is chosen to conform to specific characteristics of the HVS. Also introduced are two modifications of VPISC: adaptive and foveal VPISC. These are spatiotemporally nonuniform implementations that code different portions of the image sequence at different resolutions, according to either a fidelity criterion (for AVPISC) or a foveation criterion (for FVPISC). >