Feature-based compression of human face images

A method is developed for feature-based coding of human face images. Deformable templates, wavelet decomposition, and residual vector quantization (RVQ) form three consecutive stages of the proposed method, which aims for recognition-based very low bit rate coding. Deformable templates are employed in localization of facial features and biorthogonal spline filters are used for the decomposition of segmented and normalized face images. Wavelet coefficients are zonal truncated before being vector quantized to generate multiresolution codebooks. Classified multiresolution codebooks are also generated for residual eye and mouth images to improve subjective quality of salient face features. (C) 1998 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [S0091-3286(98)02105-9].