The Coding Ecology: Image Coding via Competition among Experts
V. Michael Bove, Jr. and William Butera
MIT Media Laboratory
Proc. 1999 Picture Coding Symposium
We consider the image coding problem as a competitive ecology of
specialists, each vying for the task of coding a portion of an
image. Each specialist, or expert, derives its competitive advantage
from its ability to concisely describe an underlying visual event
( e.g. shadows, motion, occluding objects). Experts locate
candidate regions of support, characterize the activity within and
submit their proposals in the form of a bid passed along to an
auctioneer. In this paper, the metaphor of an auction informs the
design of a predictive coder. We describe the designs for six experts,
specify the cost function for comparing the bids, and report coding
performance for several examples.