Focus-and-Context Skeleton-Based Image Simplification Using Saliency Maps

Medial descriptors offer a promising way for representing, simplifying, manipulating, and compressing images. However, to date, these have been applied in a global manner that is oblivious to salient features. In this paper, we adapt medial descriptors to use the information provided by saliency maps to selectively simplify and encode an image while preserving its salient regions. This allows us to improve the trade-off between compression ratio and image quality as compared to the standard dense-skeleton method while keeping perceptually salient features, in a focus-and-context manner. We show how our method can be combined with JPEG to increase overall compression rates at the cost of a slightly lower image quality. We demonstrate our method on a benchmark composed of a broad set of images.