Gaze tracking for region of interest coding in JPEG 2000

Current image coding systems such as JPEG are far away from the capability of the human perceptual system in that the encoding may not maximise the reconstruction quality of image contents. Humans are often concerned with the interpretability of the image and thus enhanced reconstruction quality in image contents would facilitate improved recognition performance. This paper addresses this issue by incorporating characteristics of the human perceptual system into an image coding system. This is achieved by analysing the spatial and temporal characteristics of the human visual attention system as recorded from an eye-tracking device at the encoding end. Human visual attention mechanisms direct the viewer's eye movements around the image to provide a sequence of fixations, which are analysed, clustered and classified into regions of interest (ROI). These ROIs are used to selectively encode and prioritise regions such that an improved image content recognition performance can be achieved.