Decoder-Guided Lossy Contour Coding Via Anchor Refinement

Abstract

Object contours serve as compact structural priors for many receiver-side vision tasks such as image super-resolution, edge-conditioned generation, and machine vision. When such tasks are deployed over a bandwidth-limited channel, the sender transmits the high-quality object contour as structural side information to guide reconstruction at the receiver, while-to save bandwidth-only a low-quality reference such as a downsampled image or base-layer reconstruction is delivered. As a result, the decoder can already extract a coarse contour from this reference at no transmission cost, creating an encoder-decoder asymmetry: the fine contour must be coded and sent, yet a free coarse version is available at the decoder. This asymmetry is ignored by existing contour codecs such as JBIG2 and chain coding, which are lossless, symmetric, and offer no rate-distortion control, leading to high bitrates. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine contour coding framework that models a high-quality contour as a structured geometric refinement of the decoder-available coarse contour. The encoder extracts ordered anchors along the fine contour and performs adaptive anchor skipping under a distortion constraint. The decoder then reconstructs the contour by using the coarse prior to guide anchor connectivity. This formulation enables lossy contour compression with an explicit rate-distortion trade-off. Experiments show 54.5%-66.9% bitrate reduction over methods without decoder-side guidance, and up to 5 times savings over JBIG2, while preserving high geometric accuracy.