Conventional image compression methods typically aim at pixel-level consistency while ignoring the performance of downstream AI tasks.To solve this problem, this paper proposes a Semantic-Assisted Image Compression method (SAIC), which can maintain semantic-level consistency to enable high performance of downstream AI tasks.To this end, we train the compression network using semantic-level loss function. In particular, semantic-level loss is measured using gradient-based semantic weights mechanism (GSW). GSW directly consider downstream AI tasks' perceptual results. Then, this paper proposes a semantic-level distortion evaluation metric to quantify the amount of semantic information retained during the compression process. Experimental results show that the proposed SAIC method can retain more semantic-level information and achieve better performance of downstream AI tasks compared to the traditional deep learning-based method and the advanced perceptual method at the same compression ratio.
Coarse-to-Fine: Progressive Image Compression for Semantically Hierarchical Classification
School of Integrated Technology, Yonsei University（延世大学整合技术学院）；BK21 Graduate Program in Intelligent Semiconductor Technology, Yonsei University（延世大学智能半导体技术研究生项目）；Department of Artificial Intelligence, Chung-Ang University（成均馆大学人工智能系）
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；SenseBrain Technology（感脑科技）
While humans can effortlessly transform complex visual scenes into simple words and the other way around by leveraging their high-level understanding of the content, conventional or the more recent learned image compression codecs do not seem to utilize the semantic meanings of visual content to their full potential. Moreover, they focus mostly on rate-distortion and tend to underperform in perception quality especially in low bitrate regime, and often disregard the performance of downstream computer vision algorithms, which is a fast-growing consumer group of compressed images in addition to …
In recent years, layered image compression is demonstrated to be a promising direction, which encodes a compact representation of the input image and apply an up-sampling network to reconstruct the image. To further improve the quality of the reconstructed image, some works transmit the semantic segment together with the compressed image data. Consequently, the compression ratio is also decreased because extra bits are required for transmitting the semantic segment. To solve this problem, we propose a new layered image compression framework with encoder-decoder matched semantic segmentation (E…
Conceptual coding has been an emerging research topic recently, which encodes natural images into disentangled conceptual representations for compression. However, the compression performance of the existing methods is still sub-optimal due to the lack of comprehensive consideration of rate constraint and reconstruction quality. To this end, we propose a novel end-to-end semantic prior modeling-based conceptual coding scheme towards extremely low bitrate image compression, which leverages semantic-wise deep representations as a unified prior for entropy estimation and texture synthesis. Specif…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
Incorporating semantic information into the codecs during image compression can significantly reduce the repetitive computation of fundamental semantic analysis (such as object recognition) in client-side applications. The same practice also enable the compressed code to carry the image semantic information during storage and transmission. In this paper, we propose a concept called Deep Semantic Image Compression (DeepSIC) and put forward two novel architectures that aim to reconstruct the compressed image and generate corresponding semantic representations at the same time. The first architec…
FaSDiff: Balancing Perception and Semantics in Face Compression via Stable Diffusion Priors
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Research Center of Artificial Intelligence, Pengcheng Laboratory（人工智能研究中心，鹏城实验室）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Huawei Manufacturing（华为制造）
MISC: Ultra-low Bitrate Image Semantic Compression Driven by Large Multimodal Model
Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学图像通信与网络工程研究所）；John Hopcroft Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学约翰·霍普克罗夫特中心）；S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学S-Lab）
CAS Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-spatial Information Processing and Application System University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学中国科学院地理空间信息处理与应用系统技术重点实验室）
Surveillance and security scenarios usually require high efficient facial image compression scheme for face recognition and identification. While either traditional general image codecs or special facial image compression schemes only heuristically refine codec separately according to face verification accuracy metric. We propose a Learning based Facial Image Compression (LFIC) framework with a novel Regionally Adaptive Pooling (RAP) module whose parameters can be automatically optimized according to gradient feedback from an integrated hybrid semantic fidelity metric, including a successfully…
SDGIC: A Semantic Disambiguation-Guided Generative Image Compression Method for Ultra-Low Bitrates
School of Information and Communications Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学信息与通信工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science, The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学应用科学学院电气与计算机工程系）
It has long been considered a significant problem to improve the visual quality of lossy image and video compression. Recent advances in computing power together with the availability of large training data sets has increased interest in the application of deep learning cnns to address image recognition and image processing tasks. Here, we present a powerful cnn tailored to the specific task of semantic image understanding to achieve higher visual quality in lossy compression. A modest increase in complexity is incorporated to the encoder which allows a standard, off-the-shelf jpeg decoder to …
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Information Technology R&D Innovation Center of Peking University（北京大学信息技术创新研发中心）
Traditional image/video compression aims to reduce the transmission/storage cost with signal fidelity as high as possible. However, with the increasing demand for machine analysis and semantic monitoring in recent years, semantic fidelity rather than signal fidelity is becoming another emerging concern in image/video compression. With the recent advances in cross modal translation and generation, in this paper, we propose the cross modal compression~(CMC), a semantic compression framework for visual data, to transform the high redundant visual data~(such as image, video, etc.) into a compact, …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Essex University（埃塞克斯大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Deep learning has shown impressive performance in semantic segmentation, but it is still unaffordable for resource-constrained mobile devices. While offloading computation tasks is promising, the high traffic demands overwhelm the limited bandwidth. Existing compression algorithms are not fit for semantic segmentation, as the lack of obvious and concentrated regions of interest (RoIs) forces the adoption of uniform compression strategies, leading to low compression ratios or accuracy. This paper introduces STAC, a DNN-driven compression scheme tailored for edge-assisted semantic video segmenta…
Hierarchical Semantic Compression for Consistent Image Semantic Restoration
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学电子信息工程学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Electronic and Information Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学电子信息工程学院）
Free-VSC: Free Semantics from Visual Foundation Models for Unsupervised Video Semantic Compression
Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学图像通信与网络工程研究所）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
ENCORE: Event-Assisted Complementary Motion Refinement for Learned Video Compression
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Ningbo University（宁波大学人工智能学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；School of Information Engineering, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law（中南财经政法大学信息工程学院）
Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, Peking University（北京大学遥感与地理信息系统研究所）
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is an approach to minimizing domain gap. Generative methods are common approaches to minimizing the domain gap of aerial images which improves the performance of the downstream tasks, e.g., cross-domain semantic segmentation. For aerial images, the digital surface model (DSM) is usually available in both the source domain and the target domain. Depth information in DSM brings external information to generative models. However, little research utilizes it. In this paper, depth-assisted ResiDualGAN (DRDG) is proposed where depth supervised loss (DSL), and dep…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
The task of Dense Video Captioning (DVC) aims to generate captions with timestamps for multiple events in one video. Semantic information plays an important role for both localization and description of DVC. We present a semantic-assisted dense video captioning model based on the encoding-decoding framework. In the encoding stage, we design a concept detector to extract semantic information, which is then fused with multi-modal visual features to sufficiently represent the input video. In the decoding stage, we design a classification head, paralleled with the localization and captioning heads…
The edge computing paradigm places compute-capable devices - edge servers - at the network edge to assist mobile devices in executing data analysis tasks. Intuitively, offloading compute-intense tasks to edge servers can reduce their execution time. However, poor conditions of the wireless channel connecting the mobile devices to the edge servers may degrade the overall capture-to-output delay achieved by edge offloading. Herein, we focus on edge computing supporting remote object detection by means of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), and develop a framework to reduce the amount of data transmitte…
Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Deep learning has revolutionized many computer vision fields in the last few years, including learning-based image compression. In this paper, we propose a deep semantic segmentation-based layered image compression (DSSLIC) framework in which the semantic segmentation map of the input image is obtained and encoded as the base layer of the bit-stream. A compact representation of the input image is also generated and encoded as the first enhancement layer. The segmentation map and the compact version of the image are then employed to obtain a coarse reconstruction of the image. The residual betw…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）
The task of 3D semantic scene graph (3DSSG) prediction in the point cloud is challenging since (1) the 3D point cloud only captures geometric structures with limited semantics compared to 2D images, and (2) long-tailed relation distribution inherently hinders the learning of unbiased prediction. Since 2D images provide rich semantics and scene graphs are in nature coped with languages, in this study, we propose Visual-Linguistic Semantics Assisted Training (VL-SAT) scheme that can significantly empower 3DSSG prediction models with discrimination about long-tailed and ambiguous semantic relatio…
Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Outdoor scene completion is a challenging issue in 3D scene understanding, which plays an important role in intelligent robotics and autonomous driving. Due to the sparsity of LiDAR acquisition, it is far more complex for 3D scene completion and semantic segmentation. Since semantic features can provide constraints and semantic priors for completion tasks, the relationship between them is worth exploring. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end semantic segmentation-assisted scene completion network, including a 2D completion branch and a 3D semantic segmentation branch. Specifically, the network …
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；Tencent Map, T Lab（腾讯地图T实验室）
As camera and LiDAR sensors capture complementary information used in autonomous driving, great efforts have been made to develop semantic segmentation algorithms through multi-modality data fusion. However, fusion-based approaches require paired data, i.e., LiDAR point clouds and camera images with strict point-to-pixel mappings, as the inputs in both training and inference, which seriously hinders their application in practical scenarios. Thus, in this work, we propose the 2D Priors Assisted Semantic Segmentation (2DPASS), a general training scheme, to boost the representation learning on po…
Learning descriptive 3D features is crucial for understanding 3D scenes with diverse objects and complex structures. However, it is usually unknown whether important geometric attributes and scene context obtain enough emphasis in an end-to-end trained 3D scene understanding network. To guide 3D feature learning toward important geometric attributes and scene context, we explore the help of textual scene descriptions. Given some free-form descriptions paired with 3D scenes, we extract the knowledge regarding the object relationships and object attributes. We then inject the knowledge to 3D fea…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
3D visual grounding aims at grounding a natural language description about a 3D scene, usually represented in the form of 3D point clouds, to the targeted object region. Point clouds are sparse, noisy, and contain limited semantic information compared with 2D images. These inherent limitations make the 3D visual grounding problem more challenging. In this study, we propose 2D Semantics Assisted Training (SAT) that utilizes 2D image semantics in the training stage to ease point-cloud-language joint representation learning and assist 3D visual grounding. The main idea is to learn auxiliary align…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Recognizing 3D part instances from a 3D point cloud is crucial for 3D structure and scene understanding. Several learning-based approaches use semantic segmentation and instance center prediction as training tasks and fail to further exploit the inherent relationship between shape semantics and part instances. In this paper, we present a new method for 3D part instance segmentation. Our method exploits semantic segmentation to fuse nonlocal instance features, such as center prediction, and further enhances the fusion scheme in a multi- and cross-level way. We also propose a semantic region cen…
Technische Universität Braunschweig（布伦瑞克工业大学）；Volkswagen Group Research – Automated Driving（大众集团研究部-自动驾驶）
The high amount of sensors required for autonomous driving poses enormous challenges on the capacity of automotive bus systems. There is a need to understand tradeoffs between bitrate and perception performance. In this paper, we compare the image compression standards JPEG, JPEG2000, and WebP to a modern encoder/decoder image compression approach based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). We evaluate both the pure compression performance using typical metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM) and others, but also the performance of a subsequent perc…
Balancing Saliency and Coverage: Semantic Prominence-Aware Budgeting for Visual Token Compression in VLMs
Interdisciplinary Program in AI, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学人工智能跨学科项目）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学电子与计算机工程系）；Department of Artificial Intelligence, Chung-Ang University（成均馆大学人工智能系）
University of Missouri（密苏里大学）；University of Technology（理工大学）；U.S. Naval Research Laboratory（美国海军研究实验室）
Detection of moving objects such as vehicles in videos acquired from an airborne camera is very useful for video analytics applications. Using fast low power algorithms for onboard moving object detection would also provide region of interest-based semantic information for scene content aware image compression. This would enable more efficient and flexible communication link utilization in lowbandwidth airborne cloud computing networks. Despite recent advances in both UAV or drone platforms and imaging sensor technologies, vehicle detection from aerial video remains challenging due to small ob…
