Asymmetric binary tree coding for contour images

We consider the coding of featured contours, i.e. texture, object or motion boundaries in images. The MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 video coding standards provide for a content-based representation of video information, so efficient coding of boundaries can play an important role. We propose a new coding scheme that uses an asymmetric binary tree. We show that the new scheme outperforms conventional quadtree, binary tree, contour and READ coding algorithms applied to typical boundary images and also offers competitive performance for general-purpose two-level image coding.