Quality Evaluation and Nonuniform Compression of Geometrically Distorted Images Using the Quadtree Distortion Map

The paper presents an analysis of the effects of lossy compression algorithms applied to images affected by geometrical distortion. It will be shown that the encoding-decoding process results in a nonhomogeneous image degradation in the geometrically corrected image, due to the different amount of information associated to each pixel. A distortion measure named quadtree distortion map (QDM) able to quantify this aspect is proposed. Furthermore, QDM is exploited to achieve adaptive compression of geometrically distorted pictures, in order to ensure a uniform quality on the final image. Tests are performed using JPEG and JPEG2000 coding standards in order to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the performance of the proposed method.