Methods for pre-processing video sequences prior to compression to provide data reduction of the video sequence. Also, after compression of the pre-processed video sequence, the bit rate of the pre-processed and compressed video sequence will be lower than the bit rate of the video sequence after compression but without pre-processing. Pre-processing may include spatial anisotropic diffusion filtering such as Perona-Malik filtering, Fallah-Ford filtering, or omni-directional filtering that extends Perona-Malik filtering to perform filtering in at least one diagonal direction. Pre-processing may also include performing filtering differently on a foreground region than on a background region of a video frame. This method includes identifying pixel locations having pixel values matching characteristics of human skin and determining a bounding shape for each contiguous grouping of matching pixel locations. The foreground region is comprised of pixel locations contained in a bounding shape and the background region is comprised of all other pixel locations.