Compression of facial images using the K-SVD algorithm

  • Authors:
  • Ori Bryt;Michael Elad

  • Affiliations:
  • The Electrical Engineering Department, The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Technion City, Haifa 32000, Israel;The Computer Science Department, The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Taub Building, Office 516, Technion City, Haifa 32000, Israel

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

The use of sparse representations in signal and image processing is gradually increasing in the past several years. Obtaining an overcomplete dictionary from a set of signals allows us to represent them as a sparse linear combination of dictionary atoms. Pursuit algorithms are then used for signal decomposition. A recent work introduced the K-SVD algorithm, which is a novel method for training overcomplete dictionaries that lead to sparse signal representation. In this work we propose a new method for compressing facial images, based on the K-SVD algorithm. We train K-SVD dictionaries for predefined image patches, and compress each new image according to these dictionaries. The encoding is based on sparse coding of each image patch using the relevant trained dictionary, and the decoding is a simple reconstruction of the patches by linear combination of atoms. An essential pre-process stage for this method is an image alignment procedure, where several facial features are detected and geometrically warped into a canonical spatial location. We present this new method, analyze its results and compare it to several competing compression techniques.