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）
随着存储与通信协议的演进，超低码率图像压缩已成为一项需求迫切的研究课题。然而，现有压缩算法在超低码率下，要么会牺牲与真实值的一致性，要么会损失感知质量。近年来，大多模态模型（Large Multimodal Model，LMM）的快速发展为平衡这两个目标提供了可能。为解决该问题，本文提出了名为多模态图像语义压缩（Multimodal Image Semantic Compression，MISC）的方法，该方法由用于提取图像语义信息的LMM编码器、用于定位语义对应区域的映射编码器、生成极压缩码流的图像编码器，以及基于上述信息重建图像的解码器组成。实验结果表明，本文提出的MISC既适用于压缩传统自然感知图像（Natural Sense Images，NSIs），也适用于新兴的AI生成图像（AI-Generated Images，AIGIs）内容。它能够在节省50%码率的同时实现最优的一致性与感知效果，在下一代存储与通信领域具有很强的应用潜力。代码将发布于https://github.com/lcysyzxdxc/MISC。
英文摘要：
With the evolution of storage and communication protocols, ultra-low bitrate image compression has become a highly demanding topic. However, existing compression algorithms must sacrifice either consistency with the ground truth or perceptual quality at ultra-low bitrate. In recent years, the rapid development of the Large Multimodal Model (LMM) has made it possible to balance these two goals. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method called Multimodal Image Semantic Compression (MISC), which consists of an LMM encoder for extracting the semantic information of the image, a map encoder to locate the region corresponding to the semantic, an image encoder generates an extremely compressed bitstream, and a decoder reconstructs the image based on the above information. Experimental results show that our proposed MISC is suitable for compressing both traditional Natural Sense Images (NSIs) and emerging AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) content. It can achieve optimal consistency and perception results while saving 50% bitrate, which has strong potential applications in the next generation of storage and communication. The code will be released on https://github.com/lcysyzxdxc/MISC.
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
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 …
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…
Generative Latent Coding for Ultra-Low Bitrate Image and Video Compression
MoE Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Perception and Cognition, University of Science and Technology of China（脑启发式智能感知与认知联合实验室，中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
In this paper we tackle the problem of stereo image compression, and leverage the fact that the two images have overlapping fields of view to further compress the representations. Our approach leverages state-of-the-art single-image compression autoencoders and enhances the compression with novel parametric skip functions to feed fully differentiable, disparity-warped features at all levels to the encoder/decoder of the second image. Moreover, we model the probabilistic dependence between the image codes using a conditional entropy model. Our experiments show an impressive 30 - 50% reduction i…
Joint Degradation-Aware Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution for Variable-Rate Extreme Image Compression
School of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学信息科学与电子工程学院）；Department of Electronic Engineer and Information Science, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学电子工程与信息科学系）；MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能教育部重点实验室）
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…
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）
Exploiting Semantic and Pixel Representations for Ultra-Low Bitrate Image Compression
National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（人机混合增强智能国家重点实验室，人工智能与机器人研究院，西安交通大学）；School of Information and Telecommunication, Xi’an Jiaotong University（信息与电信学院，西安交通大学）；Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia（计算机科学与软件工程系，西澳大学）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Deep learning techniques have shown promising results in image compression, with competitive bitrate and image reconstruction quality from compressed latent. However, while image compression has progressed towards a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and fewer bits per pixel (bpp), their robustness to adversarial images has never received deliberation. In this work, we, for the first time, investigate the robustness of image compression systems where imperceptible perturbation of input images can precipitate a significant increase in the bitrate of their compressed latent. To characteriz…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
Recently, more and more images are compressed and sent to the back-end devices for the machine analysis tasks~(\textit{e.g.,} object detection) instead of being purely watched by humans. However, most traditional or learned image codecs are designed to minimize the distortion of the human visual system without considering the increased demand from machine vision systems. In this work, we propose a preprocessing enhanced image compression method for machine vision tasks to address this challenge. Instead of relying on the learned image codecs for end-to-end optimization, our framework is built …
Neural image compression (NIC) has outperformed traditional image codecs in rate-distortion (R-D) performance. However, it usually requires a dedicated encoder-decoder pair for each point on R-D curve, which greatly hinders its practical deployment. While some recent works have enabled bitrate control via conditional coding, they impose strong prior during training and provide limited flexibility. In this paper we propose Code Editing, a highly flexible coding method for NIC based on semi-amortized inference and adaptive quantization. Our work is a new paradigm for variable bitrate NIC. Furthe…
Towards Extreme Image Compression with Latent Feature Guidance and Diffusion Prior
China Telecom Group Corporation-Xi’an Jiaotong University Jointly Established Intelligent Cloud Network Science and Education Integration Innovation Research Institute（中国电信集团有限公司-西安交通大学联合成立的智能云网科教融合创新研究院）
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…
Ningbo Institute of Digital Twin, Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工大学宁波数字孪生研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
We extensively study how to combine Generative Adversarial Networks and learned compression to obtain a state-of-the-art generative lossy compression system. In particular, we investigate normalization layers, generator and discriminator architectures, training strategies, as well as perceptual losses. In contrast to previous work, i) we obtain visually pleasing reconstructions that are perceptually similar to the input, ii) we operate in a broad range of bitrates, and iii) our approach can be applied to high-resolution images. We bridge the gap between rate-distortion-perception theory and pr…
Nokia Technologies（诺基亚科技）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
Today, according to the Cisco Annual Internet Report (2018-2023), the fastest-growing category of Internet traffic is machine-to-machine communication. In particular, machine-to-machine communication of images and videos represents a new challenge and opens up new perspectives in the context of data compression. One possible solution approach consists of adapting current human-targeted image and video coding standards to the use case of machine consumption. Another approach consists of developing completely new compression paradigms and architectures for machine-to-machine communications. In t…
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）
This work focuses on low bitrate video streaming scenarios (e.g. 50 - 200Kbps) where the video quality is severely compromised. We present a family of novel deep generative models for enhancing perceptual video quality of such streams by performing super-resolution while also removing compression artifacts. Our model, which we call SuperTran, consumes as input a single high-quality, high-resolution reference images in addition to the low-quality, low-resolution video stream. The model thus learns how to borrow or copy visual elements like textures from the reference image and fill in the remai…
