Video Compression for Object Detection Algorithms

Video compression algorithms have been designed aiming at pleasing human viewers, and are driven by video quality metrics that are designed to account for the capabilities of the human visual system. However, thanks to the advances in computer vision systems more and more videos are going to be watched by algorithms, e.g. implementing video surveillance systems or performing automatic video tagging. This paper describes an adaptive video coding approach for computer vision-based systems. We show how to control the quality of video compression so that automatic object detectors can still process the resulting video, improving their detection performance, by preserving the elements of the scene that are more likely to contain meaningful content. Our approach is based on the computation of saliency maps exploiting a fast objectness measure. The computational efficiency of this approach makes it usable in a real-time video coding pipeline. Experiments show that our technique outperforms standard H.265 in speed and coding efficiency, and can be applied to different types of video domains, from surveillance to web videos.