The technology, called Lossy/Lossless Region-of-Interest (ROI) Coding, is a customizable image coding scheme, compressing images in a manner that allows users to specify which parts of an image they want to see or send with a higher resolution. The advantage of this technology is that while it compresses images for fast transmission over a data line, it also gives users the chance to decide which information they want to remain unchanged (lossless), and retain all of the image quality for that region. ROI allows a user to specify these important parts of the image either before or during the early stages of the image coding (compression) process.

ROI has potential applications for medical image transmission over terrestrial or wireless channels, Internet data transfer, and image based surveillance systems, possibly combined with Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). This type of compression technology could help to alleviate the Internet bottleneck that stems from the overwhelming amount of data passing through congested lines.

This technology was proposed to the JPEG-2000 Committee as an important functionality to be incorporated into the next generation image coding system. JPEG-2000 is an on-going project on the Coding of Still Pictures administered by the International Standardization Organization (ISO).