Salience-based compression: providing FMV over low-bit rate channels

We introduce Salience-Based Compression (SBC), a vision-guided pre-filtering technology, coupled with standards-based video coding. SBC works by detecting and tracking salient features and keeping them sharp; non-salient features are lowpass filtered, causing an automatic and beneficial drop in bit rate. Because salience-based pre-filtering is performed as a pre-processing step, it can interface to any COTS video encoder, thus enabling use in existing infrastructures and ensuring the compliance of the video bitstream that is produced. For typical aerial surveillance video, SBC can reduce bit rate by up to a factor of four, yet still provide full motion video (FMV) and preserve salient visual information.