A variety of applications involve transmission of video data in real time. However, bandwidth limitations may result in degradation of the quality of the transmitted video. To address such limitations, a video stream may be limited to ‘regions of interest’ within each frame of the video stream. This can be accomplished by setting areas outside of the regions of interest to an a priori known color or ‘blanking’ color, and the resulting ‘blanked’ video stream can be compressed and transmitted without extensive modifications to existing transmission apparatus. The original video can be reconstituted by superimposing the received region-of-interest video data onto a background image of the environment that contains the regions-of-interest. The background image can be satellite imagery or other stored imagery that matches the perspective of the video stream. Geographical tag data can be used to superimpose the region-of-interest video data onto the background image.