In this paper, we introduce a deep multiple description coding (MDC) framework optimized by minimizing multiple description (MD) compressive loss. First, MD multi-scale-dilated encoder network generates multiple description tensors, which are discretized by scalar quantizers, while these quantized tensors are decompressed by MD cascaded-ResBlock decoder networks. To greatly reduce the total amount of artificial neural network parameters, an auto-encoder network composed of these two types of network is designed as a symmetrical parameter sharing structure. Second, this autoencoder network and a pair of scalar quantizers are simultaneously learned in an end-to-end self-supervised way. Third, considering the variation in the image spatial distribution, each scalar quantizer is accompanied by an importance-indicator map to generate MD tensors, rather than using direct quantization. Fourth, we introduce the multiple description structural similarity distance loss, which implicitly regularizes the diversified multiple description generations, to explicitly supervise multiple description diversified decoding in addition to MD reconstruction loss. Finally, we demonstrate that our MDC framework performs better than several state-of-the-art MDC approaches regarding image coding efficiency when tested on several commonly available datasets.
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Facebook, Inc.（脸书公司）
A multi-grid multi-block-size vector quantization (MGBVQ) method is proposed for image coding in this work. The fundamental idea of image coding is to remove correlations among pixels before quantization and entropy coding, e.g., the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and intra predictions, adopted by modern image coding standards. We present a new method to remove pixel correlations. First, by decomposing correlations into long- and short-range correlations, we represent long-range correlations in coarser grids due to their smoothness, thus leading to a multi-grid (MG) coding architecture. Secon…
MEC-Quant: Maximum Entropy Coding for Extremely Low Bit Quantization-Aware Training
Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology（信息技术学院，北京理工大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)（中国科学院大学，中国科学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（计算技术研究所，中国科学院）
Neural networks are both computationally intensive and memory intensive, making them difficult to deploy on embedded systems with limited hardware resources. To address this limitation, we introduce "deep compression", a three stage pipeline: pruning, trained quantization and Huffman coding, that work together to reduce the storage requirement of neural networks by 35x to 49x without affecting their accuracy. Our method first prunes the network by learning only the important connections. Next, we quantize the weights to enforce weight sharing, finally, we apply Huffman coding. After the first …
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Taiyuan University of Science and Technology（太原科技大学）
In this paper, we propose a deep multiple description coding framework, whose quantizers are adaptively learned via the minimization of multiple description compressive loss. Firstly, our framework is built upon auto-encoder networks, which have multiple description multi-scale dilated encoder network and multiple description decoder networks. Secondly, two entropy estimation networks are learned to estimate the informative amounts of the quantized tensors, which can further supervise the learning of multiple description encoder network to represent the input image delicately. Thirdly, a pair …
Rate-Distortion Optimized Quantization (RDOQ) has played an important role in the coding performance of recent video compression standards such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9 and AV1. This scheme yields significant reductions in bit-rate at the expense of relatively small increases in distortion. Typically, RDOQ algorithms are prohibitively expensive to implement on real-time hardware encoders due to their sequential nature and their need to frequently obtain entropy coding costs. This work addresses this limitation using a neural network-based approach, which learns to trade-off rate and disto…
Automated Tomato Maturity Estimation Using an Optimized Residual Model with Pruning and Quantization Techniques
Auburn University（奥本大学）；National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）；University of Agriculture, Faisalabad（费萨拉巴德农业大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；University of Wyoming（怀俄明大学）；National Institute of Food Science and Technology（国家食品科学与技术研究所）
Neural architecture search (NAS) aims to produce the optimal sparse solution from a high-dimensional space spanned by all candidate connections. Current gradient-based NAS methods commonly ignore the constraint of sparsity in the search phase, but project the optimized solution onto a sparse one by post-processing. As a result, the dense super-net for search is inefficient to train and has a gap with the projected architecture for evaluation. In this paper, we formulate neural architecture search as a sparse coding problem. We perform the differentiable search on a compressed lower-dimensional…
Quantization is essential to simplify DNN inference in edge applications. Existing uniform and non-uniform quantization methods, however, exhibit an inherent conflict between the representing range and representing resolution, and thereby result in either underutilized bit-width or significant accuracy drop. Moreover, these methods encounter three drawbacks: i) the absence of a quantitative metric for in-depth analysis of the source of the quantization errors; ii) the limited focus on the image classification tasks based on CNNs; iii) the unawareness of the real hardware and energy consumption…
DPICT is the first learning-based image codec supporting fine granular scalability. In this paper, we describe how to implement two key components of DPICT efficiently: trit-plane slicing and rate-distortion-optimized (RD-optimized) coding. In DPICT, we transform an image into a latent tensor, represent the tensor in ternary digits (trits), and encode the trits in the decreasing order of significance. For entropy encoding, it is necessary to compute the probability of each trit, which demands high time complexity in both the encoder and the decoder. To reduce the complexity, we develop a paral…
Towards Accurate Image Coding: Improved Autoregressive Image Generation with Dynamic Vector Quantization
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
Conventional video compression (VC) methods are based on motion compensated transform coding, and the steps of motion estimation, mode and quantization parameter selection, and entropy coding are optimized individually due to the combinatorial nature of the end-to-end optimization problem. Learned VC allows end-to-end rate-distortion (R-D) optimized training of nonlinear transform, motion and entropy model simultaneously. Most works on learned VC consider end-to-end optimization of a sequential video codec based on R-D loss averaged over pairs of successive frames. It is well-known in conventi…
intoPIX（intoPIX公司）；Université catholique de Louvain（鲁汶天主教大学）
Convolutional autoencoders are now at the forefront of image compression research. To improve their entropy coding, encoder output is typically analyzed with a second autoencoder to generate per-variable parametrized prior probability distributions. We instead propose a compression scheme that uses a single convolutional autoencoder and multiple learned prior distributions working as a competition of experts. Trained prior distributions are stored in a static table of cumulative distribution functions. During inference, this table is used by an entropy coder as a look-up-table to determine the…
SQ-GAN: Semantic Image Communications Using Masked Vector Quantization
CNIT - National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications（CNIT-国家大学间电信联合体）；Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学）；Technical University of Berlin（柏林技术大学）
In this paper, we investigate lossy compression of deep neural networks (DNNs) by weight quantization and lossless source coding for memory-efficient deployment. Whereas the previous work addressed non-universal scalar quantization and entropy coding of DNN weights, we for the first time introduce universal DNN compression by universal vector quantization and universal source coding. In particular, we examine universal randomized lattice quantization of DNNs, which randomizes DNN weights by uniform random dithering before lattice quantization and can perform near-optimally on any source withou…
Qualcomm AI Research, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司高通人工智能研究院）；University of California Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Qualcomm AI Research, Qualcomm Technologies Netherlands B.V.（高通技术荷兰有限公司高通人工智能研究院）
We present PLONQ, a progressive neural image compression scheme which pushes the boundary of variable bitrate compression by allowing quality scalable coding with a single bitstream. In contrast to existing learned variable bitrate solutions which produce separate bitstreams for each quality, it enables easier rate-control and requires less storage. Leveraging the latent scaling based variable bitrate solution, we introduce nested quantization, a method that defines multiple quantization levels with nested quantization grids, and progressively refines all latents from the coarsest to the fines…
In the past decades, lots of progress have been done in the video compression field including traditional video codec and learning-based video codec. However, few studies focus on using preprocessing techniques to improve the rate-distortion performance. In this paper, we propose a rate-perception optimized preprocessing (RPP) method. We first introduce an adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform loss function which can save the bitrate and keep essential high frequency components as well. Furthermore, we also combine several state-of-the-art techniques from low-level vision fields into our approach…
We show how real-number codes can be used to compress correlated sources, and establish a new framework for lossy distributed source coding, in which we quantize compressed sources instead of compressing quantized sources. This change in the order of binning and quantization blocks makes it possible to model correlation between continuous-valued sources more realistically and correct quantization error when the sources are completely correlated. The encoding and decoding procedures are described in detail, for discrete Fourier transform (DFT) codes. Reconstructed signal, in the mean squared er…
We solve the analysis sparse coding problem considering a combination of convex and non-convex sparsity promoting penalties. The multi-penalty formulation results in an iterative algorithm involving proximal-averaging. We then unfold the iterative algorithm into a trainable network that facilitates learning the sparsity prior. We also consider quantization of the network weights. Quantization makes neural networks efficient both in terms of memory and computation during inference, and also renders them compatible for low-precision hardware deployment. Our learning algorithm is based on a varia…
Rate-Distortion Optimized Skip Coding of Region Adaptive Hierarchical Transform Coefficients for MPEG G-PCC
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）；School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学通信工程学院）
