Recently deep learning-based methods have been applied in image compression and achieved many promising results. In this paper, we propose an improved hybrid layered image compression framework by combining deep learning and the traditional image codecs. At the encoder, we first use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to obtain a compact representation of the input image, which is losslessly encoded by the FLIF codec as the base layer of the bit stream. A coarse reconstruction of the input is obtained by another CNN from the reconstructed compact representation. The residual between the input and the coarse reconstruction is then obtained and encoded by the H.265/HEVC-based BPG codec as the enhancement layer of the bit stream. Experimental results using the Kodak and Tecnick datasets show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning-based layered coding scheme and traditional codecs including BPG in both PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics across a wide range of bit rates, when the images are coded in the RGB444 domain.
Image compression is one of the essential methods of image processing. Its most prominent advantage is the significant reduction of image size allowing for more efficient storage and transfer. However, lossy compression is associated with the loss of some image details in favor of reducing its size. In compressed images, the deficiencies are manifested by noticeable defects in the form of artifacts; the most common are block artifacts, ringing effect, or blur. In this article, we propose three models of fully convolutional networks with different configurations and examine their abilities in reducing compression artifacts. In the experiments, we research the extent to which the results are improved for models that will process the image in a similar way to the compression algorithm, and whether the initialization with predefined filters would allow for better image reconstruction than developed solely during learning.
Compression of hyperspectral images onboard of spacecrafts is a tradeoff between the limited computational resources and the ever-growing spatial and spectral resolution of the optical instruments. As such, it requires low-complexity algorithms with good rate-distortion performance and high throughput. In recent years, the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) has focused on lossless and near-lossless compression approaches based on predictive coding, resulting in the recently published CCSDS 123.0-B-2 recommended standard. While the in-loop reconstruction of quantized prediction residuals provides excellent rate-distortion performance for the near-lossless operating mode, it significantly constrains the achievable throughput due to data dependencies. In this paper, we study the performance of a faster method based on prequantization of the image followed by a lossless predictive compressor. While this is well known to be suboptimal, one can exploit powerful signal models to reconstruct the image at the ground segment, recovering part of the suboptimality. In particular, we show that convolutional neural networks can be used for this task and that they can recover the whole SNR drop incurred at a bitrate of 2 bits per pixel.
Face recognition technology has advanced rapidly and has been widely used in various applications. Due to the extremely huge amount of data of face images and the large computing resources required correspondingly in large-scale face recognition tasks, there is a requirement for a face image compression approach that is highly suitable for face recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional autoencoder compression network for face recognition tasks. In the compression process, deep features are extracted from the original image by the convolutional neural networks to produce a compact representation of the original image, which is then encoded and saved by existing codec such as PNG. This compact representation is utilized by the reconstruction network to generate a reconstructed image of the original one. In order to improve the face recognition accuracy when the compression framework is used in a face recognition system, we combine this compression framework with a existing face recognition network for joint optimization. We test the proposed scheme and find that after joint training, the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset compressed by our compression framework has higher face verification accuracy than that compressed by JPEG2000, and is much higher than that compressed by JPEG.
Detection of moving objects such as vehicles in videos acquired from an airborne camera is very useful for video analytics applications. Using fast low power algorithms for onboard moving object detection would also provide region of interest-based semantic information for scene content aware image compression. This would enable more efficient and flexible communication link utilization in lowbandwidth airborne cloud computing networks. Despite recent advances in both UAV or drone platforms and imaging sensor technologies, vehicle detection from aerial video remains challenging due to small object sizes, platform motion and camera jitter, obscurations, scene complexity and degraded imaging conditions. This paper proposes an efficient moving vehicle detection pipeline which synergistically fuses both appearance and motion-based detections in a complementary manner using deep learning combined with flux tensor spatio-temporal filtering. Our proposed multi-cue pipeline is able to detect moving vehicles with high precision and recall, while filtering out false positives such as parked vehicles, through intelligent fusion. Experimental results show that incorporating contextual information of moving vehicles enables high semantic compression ratios of over 100:1 with high image fidelity, for better utilization of limited bandwidth air-to-ground network links.
Precise estimation of the probabilistic structure of natural images plays an essential role in image compression. Despite the recent remarkable success of end-to-end optimized image compression, the latent codes are usually assumed to be fully statistically factorized in order to simplify entropy modeling. However, this assumption generally does not hold true and may hinder compression performance. Here we present context-based convolutional networks (CCNs) for efficient and effective entropy modeling. In particular, a 3D zigzag scanning order and a 3D code dividing technique are introduced to define proper coding contexts for parallel entropy decoding, both of which boil down to place translation-invariant binary masks on convolution filters of CCNs. We demonstrate the promise of CCNs for entropy modeling in both lossless and lossy image compression. For the former, we directly apply a CCN to the binarized representation of an image to compute the Bernoulli distribution of each code for entropy estimation. For the latter, the categorical distribution of each code is represented by a discretized mixture of Gaussian distributions, whose parameters are estimated by three CCNs. We then jointly optimize the CCN-based entropy model along with analysis and synthesis transforms for rate-distortion performance. Experiments on the Kodak and Tecnick datasets show that our methods powered by the proposed CCNs generally achieve comparable compression performance to the state-of-the-art while being much faster.
This paper presents a novel method which simultaneously learns the number of filters and network features repeatedly over multiple epochs. We propose a novel pruning loss to explicitly enforces the optimizer to focus on promising candidate filters while suppressing contributions of less relevant ones. In the meanwhile, we further propose to enforce the diversities between filters and this diversity-based regularization term improves the trade-off between model sizes and accuracies. It turns out the interplay between architecture and feature optimizations improves the final compressed models, and the proposed method is compared favorably to existing methods, in terms of both models sizes and accuracies for a wide range of applications including image classification, image compression and audio classification.
Image compression is an essential approach for decreasing the size in bytes of the image without deteriorating the quality of it. Typically, classic algorithms are used but recently deep-learning has been successfully applied. In this work, is presented a deep super-resolution work-flow for image compression that maps low-resolution JPEG image to the high-resolution. The pipeline consists of two components: first, an encoder-decoder neural network learns how to transform the downsampling JPEG images to high resolution. Second, a combination between Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning Actor-Critic (A3C) loss pushes the encoder-decoder to indirectly maximize High Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Although PSNR is a fully differentiable metric, this work opens the doors to new solutions for maximizing non-differential metrics through an end-to-end approach between encoder-decoder networks and reinforcement learning policy gradient methods.
A lot of work has been done in the field of image compression via machine learning, but not much attention has been given to the compression of natural language. Compressing text into lossless representations while making features easily retrievable is not a trivial task, yet has huge benefits. Most methods designed to produce feature rich sentence embeddings focus solely on performing well on downstream tasks and are unable to properly reconstruct the original sequence from the learned embedding. In this work, we propose a near lossless method for encoding long sequences of texts as well as all of their sub-sequences into feature rich representations. We test our method on sentiment analysis and show good performance across all sub-sentence and sentence embeddings.
The field of neural image compression has witnessed exciting progress as recently proposed architectures already surpass the established transform coding based approaches. While, so far, research has mainly focused on architecture and model improvements, in this work we explore content adaptive optimization. To this end, we introduce an iterative procedure which adapts the latent representation to the specific content we wish to compress while keeping the parameters of the network and the predictive model fixed. Our experiments show that this allows for an overall increase in rate-distortion performance, independently of the specific architecture used. Furthermore, we also evaluate this strategy in the context of adapting a pretrained network to other content that is different in visual appearance or resolution. Here, our experiments show that our adaptation strategy can largely close the gap as compared to models specifically trained for the given content while having the benefit that no additional data in the form of model parameter updates has to be transmitted.
This paper introduces a novel generative encoder (GE) model for generative imaging and image processing with applications in compressed sensing and imaging, image compression, denoising, inpainting, deblurring, and super-resolution. The GE model consists of a pre-training phase and a solving phase. In the pre-training phase, we separately train two deep neural networks: a generative adversarial network (GAN) with a generator $\G$ that captures the data distribution of a given image set, and an auto-encoder (AE) network with an encoder $\EN$ that compresses images following the estimated distribution by GAN. In the solving phase, given a noisy image $x=\mathcal{P}(x^*)$, where $x^*$ is the target unknown image, $\mathcal{P}$ is an operator adding an addictive, or multiplicative, or convolutional noise, or equivalently given such an image $x$ in the compressed domain, i.e., given $m=\EN(x)$, we solve the optimization problem \[ z^*=\underset{z}{\mathrm{argmin}} \|\EN(\G(z))-m\|_2^2+\lambda\|z\|_2^2 \] to recover the image $x^*$ in a generative way via $\hat{x}:=\G(z^*)\approx x^*$, where $\lambda>0$ is a hyperparameter. The GE model unifies the generative capacity of GANs and the stability of AEs in an optimization framework above instead of stacking GANs and AEs into a single network or combining their loss functions into one as in existing literature. Numerical experiments show that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms.
In this manuscript we propose two objective terms for neural image compression: a compression objective and a cycle loss. These terms are applied on the encoder output of an autoencoder and are used in combination with reconstruction losses. The compression objective encourages sparsity and low entropy in the activations. The cycle loss term represents the distortion between encoder outputs computed from the original image and from the reconstructed image (code-domain distortion). We train different autoencoders by using the compression objective in combination with different losses: a) MSE, b) MSE and MSSSIM, c) MSE, MS-SSIM and cycle loss. We observe that images encoded by these differently-trained autoencoders fall into different points of the perception-distortion curve (while having similar bit-rates). In particular, MSE-only training favors low image-domain distortion, whereas cycle loss training favors high perceptual quality.
The traditional image compressors, e.g., BPG and H.266, have achieved great image and video compression quality. Recently, Convolutional Neural Network has been used widely in image compression. We proposed an attention-based convolutional neural network for low bit-rate compression to post-process the output of traditional image compression decoder. Across the experimental results on validation sets, the post-processing module trained by MAE and MS-SSIM losses yields the highest PSNR of 32.10 on average at the bit-rate of 0.15.
Image feature extraction and matching is a fundamental but computation intensive task in machine vision. This paper proposes a novel FPGA-based embedded system to accelerate feature extraction and matching. It implements SURF feature point detection and BRIEF feature descriptor construction and matching. For binocular stereo vision, feature matching includes both tracking matching and stereo matching, which simultaneously provide feature point correspondences and parallax information. Our system is evaluated on a ZYNQ XC7Z045 FPGA. The result demonstrates that it can process binocular video data at a high frame rate (640$\times$480 @ 162fps). Moreover, an extensive test proves our system has robustness for image compression, blurring and illumination.
We propose an efficient two-layer near-lossless coding method using an extended histogram packing technique with backward compatibility to the legacy JPEG standard. The JPEG XT, which is the international standard to compress HDR images, adopts a two-layer coding method for backward compatibility to the legacy JPEG standard. However, there are two problems with this two-layer coding method. One is that it does not exhibit better near-lossless performance than other methods for HDR image compression with single-layer structure. The other problem is that the determining the appropriate values of the coding parameters may be required for each input image to achieve good compression performance of near-lossless compression with the two-layer coding method of the JPEG XT. To solve these problems, we focus on a histogram-packing technique that takes into account the histogram sparseness of HDR images. We used zero-skip quantization, which is an extension of the histogram-packing technique proposed for lossless coding, for implementing the proposed near-lossless coding method. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method exhibits not only a better near-lossless compression performance than that of the two-layer coding method of the JPEG XT, but also there are no issue regarding the combination of parameter values without losing backward compatibility to the JPEG standard.
In this paper, we present a novel approach for fine-tuning a decoder-side neural network in the context of image compression, such that the weight-updates are better compressible. At encoder side, we fine-tune a pre-trained artifact removal network on target data by using a compression objective applied on the weight-update. In particular, the compression objective encourages weight-updates which are sparse and closer to quantized values. This way, the final weight-update can be compressed more efficiently by pruning and quantization, and can be included into the encoded bitstream together with the image bitstream of a traditional codec. We show that this approach achieves reconstruction quality which is on-par or slightly superior to a traditional codec, at comparable bitrates. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to combine image compression and neural network's weight update compression.
Point cloud is a fundamental 3D representation which is widely used in real world applications such as autonomous driving. As a newly-developed media format which is characterized by complexity and irregularity, point cloud creates a need for compression algorithms which are more flexible than existing codecs. Recently, autoencoders(AEs) have shown their effectiveness in many visual analysis tasks as well as image compression, which inspires us to employ it in point cloud compression. In this paper, we propose a general autoencoder-based architecture for lossy geometry point cloud compression. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first autoencoder-based geometry compression codec that directly takes point clouds as input rather than voxel grids or collections of images. Compared with handcrafted codecs, this approach adapts much more quickly to previously unseen media contents and media formats, meanwhile achieving competitive performance. Our architecture consists of a pointnet-based encoder, a uniform quantizer, an entropy estimation block and a nonlinear synthesis transformation module. In lossy geometry compression of point cloud, results show that the proposed method outperforms the test model for categories 1 and 3 (TMC13) published by MPEG-3DG group on the 125th meeting, and on average a 73.15\% BD-rate gain is achieved.
In the advent of a digital health revolution, vast amounts of clinical data are being generated, stored and processed on a daily basis. This has made the storage and retrieval of large volumes of health-care data, especially, high-resolution medical images, particularly challenging. Effective image compression for medical images thus plays a vital role in today's healthcare information system, particularly in teleradiology. In this work, an X-ray image compression method based on a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks RNN-Conv is presented. The proposed architecture can provide variable compression rates during deployment while it requires each network to be trained only once for a specific dimension of X-ray images. The model uses a multi-level pooling scheme that learns contextualized features for effective compression. We perform our image compression experiments on the National Institute of Health (NIH) ChestX-ray8 dataset and compare the performance of the proposed architecture with a state-of-the-art RNN based technique and JPEG 2000. The experimental results depict improved compression performance achieved by the proposed method in terms of Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) metrics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported evaluation on using a deep convolutional RNN for medical image compression.
We propose a novel JPEG XT image compression with hue compensation for two-layer HDR coding. LDR images produced from JPEG XT bitstreams have some distortion in hue due to tone mapping operations. In order to suppress the color distortion, we apply a novel hue compensation method based on the maximally saturated colors. Moreover, the bitstreams generated by using the proposed method are fully compatible with the JPEG XT standard. In an experiment, the proposed method is demonstrated not only to produce images with small hue degradation but also to maintain well-mapped luminance, in terms of three kinds of criterion: TMQI, hue value in CIEDE2000, and the maximally saturated color on the constant-hue plane.
This paper proposes a novel Non-Local Attention Optimized Deep Image Compression (NLAIC) framework, which is built on top of the popular variational auto-encoder (VAE) structure. Our NLAIC framework embeds non-local operations in the encoders and decoders for both image and latent feature probability information (known as hyperprior) to capture both local and global correlations, and apply attention mechanism to generate masks that are used to weigh the features for the image and hyperprior, which implicitly adapt bit allocation for different features based on their importance. Furthermore, both hyperpriors and spatial-channel neighbors of the latent features are used to improve entropy coding. The proposed model outperforms the existing methods on Kodak dataset, including learned (e.g., Balle2019, Balle2018) and conventional (e.g., BPG, JPEG2000, JPEG) image compression methods, for both PSNR and MS-SSIM distortion metrics.