Learned image compression (LIC) has reached the traditional hand-crafted methods such as JPEG2000 and BPG in terms of the coding gain. However, the large model size of the network prohibits the usage of LIC on resource-limited embedded systems. This paper presents a LIC with 8-bit fixed-point weights. First, we quantize the weights in groups and propose a non-linear memory-free codebook. Second, we explore the optimal grouping and quantization scheme. Finally, we develop a novel weight clipping fine tuning scheme. Experimental results illustrate that the coding loss caused by the quantization is small, while around 75% model size can be reduced compared with the 32-bit floating-point anchor. As far as we know, this is the first work to explore and evaluate the LIC fully with fixed-point weights, and our proposed quantized LIC is able to outperform BPG in terms of MS-SSIM.
In deep image compression, uniform quantization is applied to latent representations obtained by using an auto-encoder architecture for reducing bits and entropy coding. Quantization is a problem encountered in the end-to-end training of deep image compression. Quantization's gradient is zero, and it cannot backpropagate meaningful gradients. Many methods have been proposed to address the approximations of quantization to obtain gradients. However, there have not been equitable comparisons among them. In this study, we comprehensively compare the existing approximations of uniform quantization…
Image compression is a fundamental research field and many well-known compression standards have been developed for many decades. Recently, learned compression methods exhibit a fast development trend with promising results. However, there is still a performance gap between learned compression algorithms and reigning compression standards, especially in terms of widely used PSNR metric. In this paper, we explore the remaining redundancy of recent learned compression algorithms. We have found accurate entropy models for rate estimation largely affect the optimization of network parameters and t…
Learned image compression (LIC) has reached a comparable coding gain with traditional hand-crafted methods such as VVC intra. However, the large network complexity prohibits the usage of LIC on resource-limited embedded systems. Network quantization is an efficient way to reduce the network burden. This paper presents a quantized LIC (QLIC) by channel splitting. First, we explore that the influence of quantization error to the reconstruction error is different for various channels. Second, we split the channels whose quantization has larger influence to the reconstruction error. After the spli…
Recently deep learning based image compression has made rapid advances with promising results based on objective quality metrics. However, a rigorous subjective quality evaluation on such compression schemes have rarely been reported. This paper aims at perceptual quality studies on learned compression. First, we build a general learned compression approach, and optimize the model. In total six compression algorithms are considered for this study. Then, we perform subjective quality tests in a controlled environment using high-resolution images. Results demonstrate learned compression optimize…
End-to-end Learned image compression (LIC) has reached the traditional hand-crafted methods such as BPG (HEVC intra) in terms of the coding gain. However, the large network size prohibits the usage of LIC on resource-limited embedded systems. This paper reduces the network complexity by quantizing both weights and activations. 1) For the weight quantization, we study different kinds of grouping and quantization scheme at first. A channel-wise non-linear quantization scheme is determined based on the coding gain analysis. After that, we propose a fine tuning scheme to clip the weights within a …
Learning-based image compression has improved to a level where it can outperform traditional image codecs such as HEVC and VVC in terms of coding performance. In addition to good compression performance, device interoperability is essential for a compression codec to be deployed, i.e., encoding and decoding on different CPUs or GPUs should be error-free and with negligible performance reduction. In this paper, we present a method to solve the device interoperability problem of a state-of-the-art image compression network. We implement quantization to entropy networks which output entropy param…
This paper explores the problem of learning transforms for image compression via autoencoders. Usually, the rate-distortion performances of image compression are tuned by varying the quantization step size. In the case of autoen-coders, this in principle would require learning one transform per rate-distortion point at a given quantization step size. Here, we show that comparable performances can be obtained with a unique learned transform. The different rate-distortion points are then reached by varying the quantization step size at test time. This approach saves a lot of training time.
It has been witnessed that learned image compression has outperformed conventional image coding techniques and tends to be practical in industrial applications. One of the most critical issues that need to be considered is the non-deterministic calculation, which makes the probability prediction cross-platform inconsistent and frustrates successful decoding. We propose to solve this problem by introducing well-developed post-training quantization and making the model inference integer-arithmetic-only, which is much simpler than presently existing training and fine-tuning based approaches yet s…
This paper explores learned image compression based on traditional and learned discrete wavelet transform (DWT) architectures and learned entropy models for coding DWT subband coefficients. A learned DWT is obtained through the lifting scheme with learned nonlinear predict and update filters. Several learned entropy models are proposed to exploit inter and intra-DWT subband coefficient dependencies, akin to traditional EZW, SPIHT, or EBCOT algorithms. Experimental results show that when the proposed learned entropy models are combined with traditional wavelet filters, such as the CDF 9/7 filte…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
In this paper, we compress convolutional neural network (CNN) weights post-training via transform quantization. Previous CNN quantization techniques tend to ignore the joint statistics of weights and activations, producing sub-optimal CNN performance at a given quantization bit-rate, or consider their joint statistics during training only and do not facilitate efficient compression of already trained CNN models. We optimally transform (decorrelate) and quantize the weights post-training using a rate-distortion framework to improve compression at any given quantization bit-rate. Transform quant…
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Multimedia Lab, Bytedance Inc.（字节跳动多媒体实验室）
Learned image compression has exhibited promising compression performance, but variable bitrates over a wide range remain a challenge. State-of-the-art variable rate methods compromise the loss of model performance and require numerous additional parameters. In this paper, we present a Quantization-error-aware Variable Rate Framework (QVRF) that utilizes a univariate quantization regulator a to achieve wide-range variable rates within a single model. Specifically, QVRF defines a quantization regulator vector coupled with predefined Lagrange multipliers to control quantization error of all late…
Deep image compression systems mainly contain four components: encoder, quantizer, entropy model, and decoder. To optimize these four components, a joint rate-distortion framework was proposed, and many deep neural network-based methods achieved great success in image compression. However, almost all convolutional neural network-based methods treat channel-wise feature maps equally, reducing the flexibility in handling different types of information. In this paper, we propose a channel-level variable quantization network to dynamically allocate more bitrates for significant channels and withdr…
This paper considers lossless image compression and presents a learned compression system that can achieve state-of-the-art lossless compression performance but uses only 59K parameters, which is more than 30x less than other learned systems proposed recently in the literature. The explored system is based on a learned pixel-by-pixel lossless image compression method, where each pixel's probability distribution parameters are obtained by processing the pixel's causal neighborhood (i.e. previously encoded/decoded pixels) with a simple neural network comprising 59K parameters. This causality cau…
Conventional video compression methods employ a linear transform and block motion model, and the steps of motion estimation, mode and quantization parameter selection, and entropy coding are optimized individually due to combinatorial nature of the end-to-end optimization problem. Learned video compression allows end-to-end rate-distortion optimized training of all nonlinear modules, quantization parameter and entropy model simultaneously. While previous work on learned video compression considered training a sequential video codec based on end-to-end optimization of cost averaged over pairs o…
Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）
Recently many works attempt to develop image compression models based on deep learning architectures, where the uniform scalar quantizer (SQ) is commonly applied to the feature maps between the encoder and decoder. In this paper, we propose to incorporate trellis coded quantizer (TCQ) into a deep learning based image compression framework. A soft-to-hard strategy is applied to allow for back propagation during training. We develop a simple image compression model that consists of three subnetworks (encoder, decoder and entropy estimation), and optimize all of the components in an end-to-end ma…
Recently, learned image compression techniques have achieved remarkable performance, even surpassing the best manually designed lossy image coders. They are promising to be large-scale adopted. For the sake of practicality, a thorough investigation of the architecture design of learned image compression, regarding both compression performance and running speed, is essential. In this paper, we first propose uneven channel-conditional adaptive coding, motivated by the observation of energy compaction in learned image compression. Combining the proposed uneven grouping model with existing context…
This paper introduces the notion of soft bits to address the rate-distortion optimization for learning-based image compression. Recent methods for such compression train an autoencoder end-to-end with an objective to strike a balance between distortion and rate. They are faced with the zero gradient issue due to quantization and the difficulty of estimating the rate accurately. Inspired by soft quantization, we represent quantization indices of feature maps with differentiable soft bits. This allows us to couple tightly the rate estimation with context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding. It als…
Learned image compression methods generally optimize a rate-distortion loss, trading off improvements in visual distortion for added bitrate. Increasingly, however, compressed imagery is used as an input to deep learning networks for various tasks such as classification, object detection, and superresolution. We propose a recognition-aware learned compression method, which optimizes a rate-distortion loss alongside a task-specific loss, jointly learning compression and recognition networks. We augment a hierarchical autoencoder-based compression network with an EfficientNet recognition model a…
This paper presents improvements and novel additions to our recent work on end-to-end optimized hierarchical bi-directional video compression to further advance the state-of-the-art in learned video compression. As an improvement, we combine motion estimation and prediction modules and compress refined residual motion vectors for improved rate-distortion performance. As novel addition, we adapted the gain unit proposed for image compression to flexible-rate video compression in two ways: first, the gain unit enables a single encoder model to operate at multiple rate-distortion operating points…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Learned video compression methods have demonstrated great promise in catching up with traditional video codecs in their rate-distortion (R-D) performance. However, existing learned video compression schemes are limited by the binding of the prediction mode and the fixed network framework. They are unable to support various inter prediction modes and thus inapplicable for various scenarios. In this paper, to break this limitation, we propose a versatile learned video compression (VLVC) framework that uses one model to support all possible prediction modes. Specifically, to realize versatile com…
For learned image compression, the autoregressive context model is proved effective in improving the rate-distortion (RD) performance. Because it helps remove spatial redundancies among latent representations. However, the decoding process must be done in a strict scan order, which breaks the parallelization. We propose a parallelizable checkerboard context model (CCM) to solve the problem. Our two-pass checkerboard context calculation eliminates such limitations on spatial locations by re-organizing the decoding order. Speeding up the decoding process more than 40 times in our experiments, it…
Learned image compression is making good progress in recent years. Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) are the two most popular evaluation metrics. As different metrics only reflect certain aspects of human perception, works in this field normally optimize two models using PSNR and MS-SSIM as loss function separately, which is suboptimal and makes it difficult to select the model with best visual quality or overall performance. Towards solving this problem, we propose to Harmonize optimization metrics in Learned Image Compression (HLIC) using onlin…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡朱利叶斯·马克西米利安大学）；KU Leuven（荷语鲁汶大学）
This paper proposes a Perceptual Learned Video Compression (PLVC) approach with recurrent conditional GAN. We employ the recurrent auto-encoder-based compression network as the generator, and most importantly, we propose a recurrent conditional discriminator, which judges on raw vs. compressed video conditioned on both spatial and temporal features, including the latent representation, temporal motion and hidden states in recurrent cells. This way, the adversarial training pushes the generated video to be not only spatially photo-realistic but also temporally consistent with the groundtruth an…
This paper introduces a novel framework for end-to-end learned video coding. Image compression is generalized through conditional coding to exploit information from reference frames, allowing to process intra and inter frames with the same coder. The system is trained through the minimization of a rate-distortion cost, with no pre-training or proxy loss. Its flexibility is assessed under three coding configurations (All Intra, Low-delay P and Random Access), where it is shown to achieve performance competitive with the state-of-the-art video codec HEVC.
Waseda University（早稻田大学）；Waseda Research Institute for Science and Engineering（早稻田大学科学与工程研究院）
Learned image compression allows achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and compression ratios, but their relatively slow runtime performance limits their usage. While previous attempts on optimizing learned image codecs focused more on the neural model and entropy coding, we present an alternative method to improving the runtime performance of various learned image compression models. We introduce multi-threaded pipelining and an optimized memory model to enable GPU and CPU workloads asynchronous execution, fully taking advantage of computational resources. Our architecture alone already produce…
Waseda University（早稻田大学）；Waseda Research Institute for Science and Engineering（早稻田大学科学与工程研究院）
Lossless image compression is an essential research field in image compression. Recently, learning-based image compression methods achieved impressive performance compared with traditional lossless methods, such as WebP, JPEG2000, and FLIF. However, there are still many impressive lossy compression methods that can be applied to lossless compression. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the methods widely used in lossy compression and apply them to lossless compression. Inspired by the impressive performance of the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) shown in lossy compression, we generate a lossless…
Scalable coding, which can adapt to channel bandwidth variation, performs well in today's complex network environment. However, the existing scalable compression methods face two challenges: reduced compression performance and insufficient scalability. In this paper, we propose the first learned fine-grained scalable image compression model (DeepFGS) to overcome the above two shortcomings. Specifically, we introduce a feature separation backbone to divide the image information into basic and scalable features, then redistribute the features channel by channel through an information rearrangeme…
Although deep learning based image compression methods have achieved promising progress these days, the performance of these methods still cannot match the latest compression standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Most of the recent developments focus on designing a more accurate and flexible entropy model that can better parameterize the distributions of the latent features. However, few efforts are devoted to structuring a better transformation between the image space and the latent feature space. In this paper, instead of employing previous autoencoder style networks to build this transform…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are known for requiring extensive computational resources, and quantization is among the best and most common methods for compressing them. While aggressive quantization (i.e., less than 4-bits) performs well for classification, it may cause severe performance degradation in image-to-image tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation. In this paper, we propose Wavelet Compressed Convolution (WCC) -- a novel approach for high-resolution activation maps compression integrated with point-wise convolutions, which are the main computational cost of m…
The JPEG image compression algorithm is the most popular method of image compression because of its ability for large compression ratios. However, to achieve such high compression, information is lost. For aggressive quantization settings, this leads to a noticeable reduction in image quality. Artifact correction has been studied in the context of deep neural networks for some time, but the current state-of-the-art methods require a different model to be trained for each quality setting, greatly limiting their practical application. We solve this problem by creating a novel architecture which …
In recent years, with the development of deep neural networks, end-to-end optimized image compression has made significant progress and exceeded the classic methods in terms of rate-distortion performance. However, most learning-based image compression methods are unlabeled and do not consider image semantics or content when optimizing the model. In fact, human eyes have different sensitivities to different content, so the image content also needs to be considered. In this paper, we propose a content-oriented image compression method, which handles different kinds of image contents with differ…
Qualcomm AI Research, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通人工智能研究院，高通技术公司）；Qualcomm AI Research, Qualcomm Technologies Netherlands B.V.（高通人工智能研究院，高通技术荷兰有限公司）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）
In this paper, we present a novel adversarial lossy video compression model. At extremely low bit-rates, standard video coding schemes suffer from unpleasant reconstruction artifacts such as blocking, ringing etc. Existing learned neural approaches to video compression have achieved reasonable success on reducing the bit-rate for efficient transmission and reduce the impact of artifacts to an extent. However, they still tend to produce blurred results under extreme compression. In this paper, we present a deep adversarial learned video compression model that minimizes an auxiliary adversarial …
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are widely used in a variety of applications, and can be seen as an unstructured version of standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). As in CNNs, the computational cost of GCNs for large input graphs (such as large point clouds or meshes) can be high and inhibit the use of these networks, especially in environments with low computational resources. To ease these costs, quantization can be applied to GCNs. However, aggressive quantization of the feature maps can lead to a significant degradation in performance. On a different note, Haar wavelet transform…
We propose in this paper a new paradigm for facial video compression. We leverage the generative capacity of GANs such as StyleGAN to represent and compress a video, including intra and inter compression. Each frame is inverted in the latent space of StyleGAN, from which the optimal compression is learned. To do so, a diffeomorphic latent representation is learned using a normalizing flows model, where an entropy model can be optimized for image coding. In addition, we propose a new perceptual loss that is more efficient than other counterparts. Finally, an entropy model for video inter coding…
We propose a novel algorithm for quantizing continuous latent representations in trained models. Our approach applies to deep probabilistic models, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs), and enables both data and model compression. Unlike current end-to-end neural compression methods that cater the model to a fixed quantization scheme, our algorithm separates model design and training from quantization. Consequently, our algorithm enables "plug-and-play" compression with variable rate-distortion trade-off, using a single trained model. Our algorithm can be seen as a novel extension of arithm…
Deep learning for computer vision depends on lossy image compression: it reduces the storage required for training and test data and lowers transfer costs in deployment. Mainstream datasets and imaging pipelines all rely on standard JPEG compression. In JPEG, the degree of quantization of frequency coefficients controls the lossiness: an 8 by 8 quantization table (Q-table) decides both the quality of the encoded image and the compression ratio. While a long history of work has sought better Q-tables, existing work either seeks to minimize image distortion or to optimize for models of the human…
