Defocus cue and saliency preserving video compression

TLDR: The objective is to preserve the defocus depth cue present in the videos along with the salient regions during compression application and a method is provided for opportunistic bit allocation during the video compression using visual saliency information comprising both the image features, such as color and contrast, and the defocusing depth cue.

Abstract: There are monocular depth cues present in images or videos that aid in depth perception in two-dimensional images or videos. Our objective is to preserve the defocus depth cue present in the videos along with the salient regions during compression application. A method is provided for opportunistic bit allocation during the video compression using visual saliency information comprising both the image features, such as color and contrast, and the defocus-based depth cue. The method is divided into two steps: saliency computation followed by compression. A nonlinear method is used to combine pure and defocus saliency maps to form the final saliency map. Then quantization values are assigned on the basis of these saliency values over a frame. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme yields good results over standard H.264 compression as well as pure and defocus saliency methods.