An adaptive approximation of countours for a region-based image sequence coding

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.