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We introduce a stop-code tolerant (SCT) approach to training recurrent convolutional neural networks for lossy image compression. Our methods introduce a multi-pass training method to combine the training goals of high-quality reconstructions in areas around stop-code masking as well as in highly-detailed areas. These methods lead to lower true bitrates for a given recursion count, both pre- and post-entropy coding, even using unstructured LZ77 code compression. The pre-LZ77 gains are achieved by trimming stop codes. The post-LZ77 gains are due to the highly unequal distributions of 0/1 codes from the SCT architectures. With these code compressions, the SCT architecture maintains or exceeds the image quality at all compression rates compared to JPEG and to RNN auto-encoders across the Kodak dataset. In addition, the SCT coding results in lower variance in image quality across the extent of the image, a characteristic that has been shown to be important in human ratings of image quality
A large fraction of Internet traffic is now driven by requests from mobile devices with relatively small screens and often stringent bandwidth requirements. Due to these factors, it has become the norm for modern graphics-heavy websites to transmit low-resolution, low-bytecount image previews (thumbnails) as part of the initial page load process to improve apparent page responsiveness. Increasing thumbnail compression beyond the capabilities of existing codecs is therefore a current research focus, as any byte savings will significantly enhance the experience of mobile device users. Toward this end, we propose a general framework for variable-rate image compression and a novel architecture based on convolutional and deconvolutional LSTM recurrent networks. Our models address the main issues that have prevented autoencoder neural networks from competing with existing image compression algorithms: (1) our networks only need to be trained once (not per-image), regardless of input image dimensions and the desired compression rate; (2) our networks are progressive, meaning that the more bits are sent, the more accurate the image reconstruction; and (3) the proposed architecture is at least as efficient as a standard purpose-trained autoencoder for a given number of bits. On a large-scale benchmark of 32$times$32 thumbnails, our LSTM-based approaches provide better visual quality than (headerless) JPEG, JPEG2000 and WebP, with a storage size that is reduced by 10% or more.
This paper presents a set of full-resolution lossy image compression methods based on neural networks. Each of the architectures we describe can provide variable compression rates during deployment without requiring retraining of the network: each network need only be trained once. All of our architectures consist of a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based encoder and decoder, a binarizer, and a neural network for entropy coding. We compare RNN types (LSTM, associative LSTM) and introduce a new hybrid of GRU and ResNet. We also study one-shot versus additive reconstruction architectures and introduce a new scaled-additive framework. We compare to previous work, showing improvements of 4.3%-8.8% AUC (area under the rate-distortion curve), depending on the perceptual metric used. As far as we know, this is the first neural network architecture that is able to outperform JPEG at image compression across most bitrates on the rate-distortion curve on the Kodak dataset images, with and without the aid of entropy coding.
Accelerating the data acquisition of dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) leads to a challenging ill-posed inverse problem, which has received great interest from both the signal processing and machine learning community over the last decades. The key ingredient to the problem is how to exploit the temporal correlation of the MR sequence to resolve the aliasing artefact. Traditionally, such observation led to a formulation of a non-convex optimisation problem, which were solved using iterative algorithms. Recently, however, deep learning based-approaches have gained significant popularity due to its ability to solve general inversion problems. In this work, we propose a unique, novel convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) architecture which reconstructs high quality cardiac MR images from highly undersampled k-space data by jointly exploiting the dependencies of the temporal sequences as well as the iterative nature of the traditional optimisation algorithms. In particular, the proposed architecture embeds the structure of the traditional iterative algorithms, efficiently modelling the recurrence of the iterative reconstruction stages by using recurrent hidden connections over such iterations. In addition, spatiotemporal dependencies are simultaneously learnt by exploiting bidirectional recurrent hidden connections across time sequences. The proposed algorithm is able to learn both the temporal dependency and the iterative reconstruction process effectively with only a very small number of parameters, while outperforming current MR reconstruction methods in terms of computational complexity, reconstruction accuracy and speed.
Segmentation of 3D images is a fundamental problem in biomedical image analysis. Deep learning (DL) approaches have achieved state-of-the-art segmentation perfor- mance. To exploit the 3D contexts using neural networks, known DL segmentation methods, including 3D convolution, 2D convolution on planes orthogonal to 2D image slices, and LSTM in multiple directions, all suffer incompatibility with the highly anisotropic dimensions in common 3D biomedical images. In this paper, we propose a new DL framework for 3D image segmentation, based on a com- bination of a fully convolutional network (FCN) and a recurrent neural network (RNN), which are responsible for exploiting the intra-slice and inter-slice contexts, respectively. To our best knowledge, this is the first DL framework for 3D image segmentation that explicitly leverages 3D image anisotropism. Evaluating using a dataset from the ISBI Neuronal Structure Segmentation Challenge and in-house image stacks for 3D fungus segmentation, our approach achieves promising results comparing to the known DL-based 3D segmentation approaches.
Classical convolutional neural networks (cCNNs) are very good at categorizing objects in images. But, unlike human vision which is relatively robust to noise in images, the performance of cCNNs declines quickly as image quality worsens. Here we propose to use recurrent connections within the convolutional layers to make networks robust against pixel noise such as could arise from imaging at low light levels, and thereby significantly increase their performance when tested with simulated noisy video sequences. We show that cCNNs classify images with high signal to noise ratios (SNRs) well, but are easily outperformed when tested with low SNR images (high noise levels) by convolutional neural networks that have recurrency added to convolutional layers, henceforth referred to as gruCNNs. Addition of Bayes-optimal temporal integration to allow the cCNN to integrate multiple image frames still does not match gruCNN performance. Additionally, we show that at low SNRs, the probabilities predicted by the gruCNN (after calibration) have higher confidence than those predicted by the cCNN. We propose to consider recurrent connections in the early stages of neural networks as a solution to computer vision under imperfect lighting conditions and noisy environments; challenges faced during real-time video streams of autonomous driving at night, during rain or snow, and other non-ideal situations.