Patent ID: 7352908
Filing Date: 2008-04-01
Classification: H04N

Abstract:
1. An image compression device, comprising: a division unit to divide an image into a plurality of regions; a wavelet transform unit to apply a wavelet transform on the plurality of regions; a region designation unit to designate a region of interest for a part of the image that is of interest; a level of interest setting unit to set a level of interest for each region of interest; a quantization rate setting unit to set a quantization rate for each wavelet transformed region, according to the level of interest, wherein when the quantization rate of the region of interest is set higher than quantization rates of the other regions, the image quality of the region of interest becomes coarser, while, when the quantization rate of the region of interest is set lower than quantization rates of the other regions, the image quality of the region of interest becomes finer; a compression control unit to control compression for each region based on the quantization rate; a quantization unit to perform quantization based on the quantization rate on the compression controlled region; and an entropy encoding unit to perform entropy encoding on quantized data generated by the quantization unit.