I think this paper, entitled "Region competition: Unifying snakes, region growing, and Bayes/MDL for multiband image segmentation" is indicative of the overall mindset. Even though the title explicitly mentions Bayes and MDL, the paper doesn't report any compression results - only segmentation results. Bayes/MDL are viewed as tricks to be used to achieve some other purpose, not as the fundamental principle justifying the research.
I searched the posts but didn't find a great deal of relevant information. Has anyone taken a serious crack at it, preferably someone who would like to share their thoughts? Is the material worthwhile? Are there any dubious portions or any sections one might want to avoid reading (either due to bad ideas or for time saving reasons)? I'm considering investing a chunk of time into investigating Legg's work so any feedback would be much appreciated, and it seems likely that there might be others who would like some perspective on it as well.