Deep neural networks represent a powerful class of function approximators that can learn to compress and reconstruct images. Existing image compression algorithms based on neural networks learn quantized representations with a constant spatial bit rate across each image. While entropy coding introduces some spatial variation, traditional codecs have benefited significantly by explicitly adapting the bit rate based on local image complexity and visual saliency. This paper introduces an algorithm that combines deep neural networks with quality-sensitive bit rate adaptation using a tiled network. We demonstrate the importance of spatial context prediction and show improved quantitative (PSNR) and qualitative (subjective rater assessment) results compared to a non-adaptive baseline and a recently published image compression model based on fully-convolutional neural networks.
We propose a versatile deep image compression network based on Spatial Feature Transform (SFT arXiv:1804.02815), which takes a source image and a corresponding quality map as inputs and produce a compressed image with variable rates. Our model covers a wide range of compression rates using a single model, which is controlled by arbitrary pixel-wise quality maps. In addition, the proposed framework allows us to perform task-aware image compressions for various tasks, e.g., classification, by efficiently estimating optimized quality maps specific to target tasks for our encoding network. This is even possible with a pretrained network without learning separate models for individual tasks. Our algorithm achieves outstanding rate-distortion trade-off compared to the approaches based on multiple models that are optimized separately for several different target rates. At the same level of compression, the proposed approach successfully improves performance on image classification and text region quality preservation via task-aware quality map estimation without additional model training. The code is available at the project website: https://github.com/micmic123/QmapCompression
In this paper, we propose a new deep image compression framework called Complexity and Bitrate Adaptive Network (CBANet), which aims to learn one single network to support variable bitrate coding under different computational complexity constraints. In contrast to the existing state-of-the-art learning based image compression frameworks that only consider the rate-distortion trade-off without introducing any constraint related to the computational complexity, our CBANet considers the trade-off between the rate and distortion under dynamic computational complexity constraints. Specifically, to decode the images with one single decoder under various computational complexity constraints, we propose a new multi-branch complexity adaptive module, in which each branch only takes a small portion of the computational budget of the decoder. The reconstructed images with different visual qualities can be readily generated by using different numbers of branches. Furthermore, to achieve variable bitrate decoding with one single decoder, we propose a bitrate adaptive module to project the representation from a base bitrate to the expected representation at a target bitrate for transmission. Then it will project the transmitted representation at the target bitrate back to that at the base bitrate for the decoding process. The proposed bit adaptive module can significantly reduce the storage requirement for deployment platforms. As a result, our CBANet enables one single codec to support multiple bitrate decoding under various computational complexity constraints. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our CBANet for deep image compression.
We present a general learning-based solution for restoring images suffering from spatially-varying degradations. Prior approaches are typically degradation-specific and employ the same processing across different images and different pixels within. However, we hypothesize that such spatially rigid processing is suboptimal for simultaneously restoring the degraded pixels as well as reconstructing the clean regions of the image. To overcome this limitation, we propose SPAIR, a network design that harnesses distortion-localization information and dynamically adjusts computation to difficult regions in the image. SPAIR comprises of two components, (1) a localization network that identifies degraded pixels, and (2) a restoration network that exploits knowledge from the localization network in filter and feature domain to selectively and adaptively restore degraded pixels. Our key idea is to exploit the non-uniformity of heavy degradations in spatial-domain and suitably embed this knowledge within distortion-guided modules performing sparse normalization, feature extraction and attention. Our architecture is agnostic to physical formation model and generalizes across several types of spatially-varying degradations. We demonstrate the efficacy of SPAIR individually on four restoration tasks-removal of rain-streaks, raindrops, shadows and motion blur. Extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons with prior art on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our degradation-agnostic network design offers significant performance gains over state-of-the-art degradation-specific architectures. Code available at https://github.com/human-analysis/spatially-adaptive-image-restoration.
We present a general technique that performs both artifact removal and image compression. For artifact removal, we input a JPEG image and try to remove its compression artifacts. For compression, we input an image and process its 8 by 8 blocks in a sequence. For each block, we first try to predict its intensities based on previous blocks; then, we store a residual with respect to the input image. Our technique reuses JPEGs legacy compression and decompression routines. Both our artifact removal and our image compression techniques use the same deep network, but with different training weights. Our technique is simple and fast and it significantly improves the performance of artifact removal and image compression.
We propose a method for lossy image compression based on recurrent, convolutional neural networks that outperforms BPG (4:2:0 ), WebP, JPEG2000, and JPEG as measured by MS-SSIM. We introduce three improvements over previous research that lead to this state-of-the-art result. First, we show that training with a pixel-wise loss weighted by SSIM increases reconstruction quality according to several metrics. Second, we modify the recurrent architecture to improve spatial diffusion, which allows the network to more effectively capture and propagate image information through the networks hidden state. Finally, in addition to lossless entropy coding, we use a spatially adaptive bit allocation algorithm to more efficiently use the limited number of bits to encode visually complex image regions. We evaluate our method on the Kodak and Tecnick image sets and compare against standard codecs as well recently published methods based on deep neural networks.