REGION-ORIENTED TRANSFORM CODING OF STILL IMAGES USING VORONOI DIAGRAMS AND SCHMIDT'S ORTHOGONALIZATION

This paper proposes a new region-oriented coding scheme of still images. The scheme first segments an image into homogeneous regions by making use of Voronoi diagrams. Then luminance components in each Voronoi region are encoded using a transform coding technique which employs the Schmidt's orthogonalization method to produce orthonormal basis-functions for arbitrarily shaped regions. In this technique, coding efficiency depends on the properties of initial vectors to be orthogonalized. Therefore we adaptively select a set of initial vectors as well as the order in which these vectors are orthogonalized. Simulation results indicate that the proposed coding scheme achieves higher coding performance with much less computation than the KLT-based scheme which we reported formerly.