JPEG-2000 Gradient-Based Coding: An Application To Object Detection

Image distortions, such as quantization errors, can have a severe negative impact on the performance of computer vision algorithms, and, more specifically, on object detection algorithms. State-of-the-art implementations of the JPEG-2000 image coder commonly allocate the available bits to minimize the Mean-Squared-Error (MSE) distortion between the original image and the resulting compressed image. However, considering that some state-of-the-art object detection methods use the gradient information as the main image feature, an improved object detection performance is expected for JPEG-2000 image coders that allocate the available bits to minimize the distortions on the gradient content. Accordingly, in this work, the Gradient Mean-Squared-Error (GMSE) based JPEG-2000 coder presents an improved object detection performance over the MSE based JPEG-2000 image coder when the object of interest is located at the same spatial location of the image regions with the strongest gradients and also for high bit-rates. For low bit-rates (e.g. 0.07bpp), the GMSE based JPEG-2000 image coder becomes overly selective in choosing the gradients to preserve, and, as a result, there is a greater chance of mismatch between the spatial locations of the gradients that the coder is trying to preserve and the spatial locations of the objects of interest.