No Arabic abstract
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.
Image compression using neural networks have reached or exceeded non-neural methods (such as JPEG, WebP, BPG). While these networks are state of the art in ratedistortion performance, computational feasibility of these models remains a challenge. We apply automatic network optimization techniques to reduce the computational complexity of a popular architecture used in neural image compression, analyze the decoder complexity in execution runtime and explore the trade-offs between two distortion metrics, rate-distortion performance and run-time performance to design and research more computationally efficient neural image compression. We find that our method decreases the decoder run-time requirements by over 50% for a stateof-the-art neural architecture.
We describe Substitutional Neural Image Compression (SNIC), a general approach for enhancing any neural image compression model, that requires no data or additional tuning of the trained model. It boosts compression performance toward a flexible distortion metric and enables bit-rate control using a single model instance. The key idea is to replace the image to be compressed with a substitutional one that outperforms the original one in a desired way. Finding such a substitute is inherently difficult for conventional codecs, yet surprisingly favorable for neural compression models thanks to their fully differentiable structures. With gradients of a particular loss backpropogated to the input, a desired substitute can be efficiently crafted iteratively. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SNIC, when combined with various neural compression models and target metrics, in improving compression quality and performing bit-rate control measured by rate-distortion curves. Empirical results of control precision and generation speed are also discussed.
End-to-end optimization capability offers neural image compression (NIC) superior lossy compression performance. However, distinct models are required to be trained to reach different points in the rate-distortion (R-D) space. In this paper, we consider the problem of R-D characteristic analysis and modeling for NIC. We make efforts to formulate the essential mathematical functions to describe the R-D behavior of NIC using deep network and statistical modeling. Thus continuous bit-rate points could be elegantly realized by leveraging such model via a single trained network. In this regard, we propose a plugin-in module to learn the relationship between the target bit-rate and the binary representation for the latent variable of auto-encoder. Furthermore, we model the rate and distortion characteristic of NIC as a function of the coding parameter $lambda$ respectively. Our experiments show our proposed method is easy to adopt and obtains competitive coding performance with fixed-rate coding approaches, which would benefit the practical deployment of NIC. In addition, the proposed model could be applied to NIC rate control with limited bit-rate error using a single network.
Recent work by Marino et al. (2020) showed improved performance in sequential density estimation by combining masked autoregressive flows with hierarchical latent variable models. We draw a connection between such autoregressive generative models and the task of lossy video compression. Specifically, we view recent neural video compression methods (Lu et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2020b; Agustssonet al., 2020) as instances of a generalized stochastic temporal autoregressive transform, and propose avenues for enhancement based on this insight. Comprehensive evaluations on large-scale video data show improved rate-distortion performance over both state-of-the-art neural and conventional video compression methods.
We describe an end-to-end trainable model for image compression based on variational autoencoders. The model incorporates a hyperprior to effectively capture spatial dependencies in the latent representation. This hyperprior relates to side information, a concept universal to virtually all modern image codecs, but largely unexplored in image compression using artificial neural networks (ANNs). Unlike existing autoencoder compression methods, our model trains a complex prior jointly with the underlying autoencoder. We demonstrate that this model leads to state-of-the-art image compression when measuring visual quality using the popular MS-SSIM index, and yields rate-distortion performance surpassing published ANN-based methods when evaluated using a more traditional metric based on squared error (PSNR). Furthermore, we provide a qualitative comparison of models trained for different distortion metrics.