EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing 
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 98181, 9 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/98181
Research Article

Perceptual Image Representation

Matei Mancas,1 Bernard Gosselin,1 and Benoît Macq2

 1Théorie des Circuits et Traitement du Signal (TCTS) Lab, Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Mons 7000, Belgium
2Laboratoire de Télécommunications et Télédétection (TELE), Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve 1348, Belgium
Received 1 August 2006; Revised 8 March 2007; Accepted 2 July 2007

Recommended by Ling Guan

Abstract

This paper describes a rarity-based visual attention model working on both still images and video sequences. Applications of this kind of models are numerous and we focus on a perceptual image representation which enhances the perceptually important areas and uses lower resolution for perceptually less important regions. Our aim is to provide an approximation of human perception by visualizing its gradual discovery of the visual environment. Comparisons with classical methods for visual attention show that the proposed algorithm is well adapted to anisotropic filtering purposes. Moreover, it has a high ability to preserve perceptually important areas as defects or abnormalities from an important loss of information. High accuracy on low-contrast defects and scalable real-time video compression may be some practical applications of the proposed image representation.