Low bit rate sigma filtered perceptual image coding

In this work we address the common problem of low bit rate image coding, i.e. perceptual quality loss. We propose a novel scheme to tackle this problem. The salient part of this work is to first encode the most important visual features of images extracted from Sigma filtering preprocessing. The preliminary results show that the image decoded by our scheme contains much less artifacts comparing to many other low-bit-rate decoded images. Our decoded image is very pleasant to human eyes. Unlike other low bit rate progressive coding methods, in which the low-bit-rate decoded image quality is good only at low resolution, our scheme provides good perceptual quality regardless of resolution size. With the advance of the Internet and multimedia integration, our method provides a promising way to make image browsing faster, and at the same time the image perceptual quality is maintained.