Abstract:Region-of-interest(ROI) image coding is a new feature in JPEG 2000,which allows for encoding the ROI in an image with better quality than the background(BG).Considering the limitations of two standard ROI coding methods defined in JPEG 2000,a new improved ROI coding method called generalized partial bitplanes shift(GPBShift) was presented.To control the relative importance between ROI and BG,the method divides the bitplanes of ROI and BG coefficients into two parts by using two scaling values respectively.Instead of shifting the bitplanes all at one by the same scaling value in the standard methods,GPBShift shifts part of them on the basis of the bitplane shifting scheme.The Maxshift,generalized bitplane-by-bitplane shift(GBbBShift) and partial significant bitplanes shift(PSBShift) methods are special cases of the GPBShift method,while GPBShift provides more flexibility for "degree-of-interest" adjustment of the ROI.The GPBShift method can code arbitrarily shaped ROI without explicitly transmitting any shape information to the decoder,and flexibly select the scaling values to adjust relative compression quality in ROI and BG.Additionally,the method can efficiently code multiple ROI with different priorities in an image.Experiments show that it can provide significantly better visual quality than the Maxshift method at low bit rates,and higher coding efficiency than the general scaling based method.