Dictionary based surveillance image compression

Common image compression techniques suitable for general purpose may be less effective for such specific applications as video surveillance. Since a stationed surveillance camera always targets at a fixed scene, its captured images exhibit high consistency in content or structure. In this paper, we propose a surveillance image compression technique via dictionary learning to fully exploit the constant characteristics of a target scene. This method transforms images over sparsely tailored over-complete dictionaries learned directly from image samples rather than a fixed one, and thus can approximate an image with fewer coefficients. A set of dictionaries trained off-line is applied for sparse representation. An adaptive image blocking method is developed so that the encoder can represent an image in a texture-aware way. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms JPEG and JPEG 2000 in terms of both quality of reconstructed images and compression ratio as well.