New video enhancement preprocessor using the region-of-interest for the videoconferencing

The development of audio/video compression systems has made feasible digital multimedia applications. Under limited bandwidth environments, the human visual attention using region-of-interest (ROI) has been reported to improve the performance in the video coding. In this paper, we propose a ROI based video preprocessor method that deals with the perceptual quality in a low-bit rate communication environment. Three separated processes of the ROI detection, the image enhancement, and the boundary reduction are proposed to deliver better video quality at the videoconferencing application for use in a fixed camera and to be compatible as a preprocessor with the conventional video coding standards. A series of the simulation results and the subjective quality comparison assessment are discussed to show the quality improvement.