A Foreground/background image coder for hardware implementation

We describe an image coder which is capable of coding the foreground and background information at different bit rates and is suitable for hardware implementation. The coder uses a face segmentation algorithm to extract the facial region which is considered to be the foreground region. The uniqueness of the approach is its simplicity from the initial colour transformation to the final bit stream coding. We present simulation results showing the expected operation and performance of the coder.