A survey of image compression methods for low depth-of-field images and image sequences

The popularity of multimedia applications has resulted in development of lossless and lossy compression techniques. Many image compression methods clustered under these two compression techniques are discussed briefly in this article. In addition to this context, the survey paper gives a study of the recent algorithms that are available for coding low Depth-of-Field (DOF) images and also covers its extension for depth map image sequence coding. Motivation behind this work is to provide a detailed analysis of these algorithms such as the methodology used, merits and demerits, and the objective and subjective comparison of these algorithms with the standard compression algorithms like JPEG, JPEG 2000, H.261/AVC etc. Further, the paper concludes with a guideline for the new researchers in this field which concerns the design of an efficient compression method for low DOF images and depth map image sequences.