Visual Important Driven Texture Map Selective Compression

In this paper, we present a visual important driven selective compression method for texture map image. It is based on the notion that the visual important area of texture map image is regarded as texel region of interest, which will be compressed less than the other background areas. In order to obtain the visual important areas, we take not only the saliency information of the texture image but also the distortion of texture mapping into accounts that are dependent on the mapped 3D model. With the help of this information, a visual important map is generated. Guided by this map, the texture map image is divided into several discrete texel region of interest and background with different priority. A selective compression method is proposed to compress these texel regions of interest and background with different compression quality by shifting the wavelet coefficients that belong to different subbands. For finding the wavelet coefficients pertaining to these texel regions of interest exactly, a novel mask generation method is presented. Experimental result shows a better performance for the visual important area, if this selective coding method is employed into the whole texture map image.