Perceptual optimization is widely recognized as essential for neural compression, yet balancing the rate-distortion-perception tradeoff remains challenging. This difficulty is especially pronounced in video compression, where frame-wise quality fluctuations often cause perceptually optimized neural video codecs to suffer from flickering artifacts. In this paper, inspired by the success of latent generative models, we present Generative Latent Video Compression (GLVC), an effective framework for perceptual video compression. GLVC employs a pretrained continuous tokenizer to project video frames into a perceptually aligned latent space, thereby offloading perceptual constraints from the rate-distortion optimization. We redesign the codec architecture explicitly for the latent domain, drawing on extensive insights from prior neural video codecs, and further equip it with innovations such as unified intra/inter coding and a recurrent memory mechanism. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks show that GLVC achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of DISTS and LPIPS metrics. Notably, our user study confirms GLVC rivals the latest neural video codecs at nearly half their rate while maintaining stable temporal coherence, marking a step toward practical perceptual video compression.
When it comes to image compression in digital cameras, denoising is traditionally performed prior to compression. However, there are applications where image noise may be necessary to demonstrate the trustworthiness of the image, such as court evidence and image forensics. This means that noise itself needs to be coded, in addition to the clean image itself. In this paper, we present a learning-based image compression framework where image denoising and compression are performed jointly. The latent space of the image codec is organized in a scalable manner such that the clean image can be deco…
LVPNet: A Latent-variable-based Prediction-driven End-to-end Framework for Lossless Compression of Medical Images
Harbin Institute of Technology, China（哈尔滨工业大学）；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, China（南京信息工程大学）；Dalian University of Technology, China（大连理工大学）；Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（南洋理工大学）
Compact Latent Representation for Image Compression (CLRIC)
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS（弗劳恩霍夫集成电路研究所）；Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Sohag University（科学学院物理系，索哈格大学）；Friedrich-Alexander University at Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔兰根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
本文提出 CLRIC，利用预训练模型潜在变量和过拟合可学习函数实现任意质量级别的感知图像压缩，兼具低复杂度、模型与分辨率无关性及接近 SOTA 的质量。
This paper presents a cross channel context model for latents in deep image compression. Generally, deep image compression is based on an autoencoder framework, which transforms the original image to latents at the encoder and recovers the reconstructed image from the quantized latents at the decoder. The transform is usually combined with an entropy model, which estimates the probability distribution of the quantized latents for arithmetic coding. Currently, joint autoregressive and hierarchical prior entropy models are widely adopted to capture both the global contexts from the hyper latents…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
In recent years, neural image compression (NIC) algorithms have shown powerful coding performance. However, most of them are not adaptive to the image content. Although several content adaptive methods have been proposed by updating the encoder-side components, the adaptability of both latents and the decoder is not well exploited. In this work, we propose a new NIC framework that improves the content adaptability on both latents and the decoder. Specifically, to remove redundancy in the latents, our content adaptive channel dropping (CACD) method automatically selects the optimal quality leve…
The non-uniform distribution and extremely sparse nature of the LiDAR point cloud (LPC) bring significant challenges to its high-efficient compression. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end, fully-factorized deep framework that encodes the original LPC into an octree structure and hierarchically decomposes the octree entropy model in layers. The proposed framework utilizes a hierarchical latent variable as side information to encapsulate the sibling and ancestor dependence, which provides sufficient context information for the modelling of point cloud distribution while enabling the parallel …
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…
Group-of-Latents: Perceptual Video Compression at Extreme Bitrates via Masked Latent Generative Modeling
State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China（多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室，计算机科学学院，北京大学，北京，中国）；State Key Discipline Laboratory of Wide Band-Gap Semiconductor Technology, School of Microelectronics, Xidian University, Xi'an, China（宽带隙半导体技术重点学科实验室，微电子学院，西安电子科技大学，西安，中国）
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）
We make the following striking observation: fully convolutional VAE models trained on 32x32 ImageNet can generalize well, not just to 64x64 but also to far larger photographs, with no changes to the model. We use this property, applying fully convolutional models to lossless compression, demonstrating a method to scale the VAE-based 'Bits-Back with ANS' algorithm for lossless compression to large color photographs, and achieving state of the art for compression of full size ImageNet images. We release Craystack, an open source library for convenient prototyping of lossless compression using pr…
Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与 mobility学院）
In recent deep image compression neural networks, the entropy model plays a critical role in estimating the prior distribution of deep image encodings. Existing methods combine hyperprior with local context in the entropy estimation function. This greatly limits their performance due to the absence of a global vision. In this work, we propose a novel Global Reference Model for image compression to effectively leverage both the local and the global context information, leading to an enhanced compression rate. The proposed method scans decoded latents and then finds the most relevant latent to a…
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…
Image compression has been investigated for many decades. Recently, deep learning approaches have achieved a great success in many computer vision tasks, and are gradually used in image compression. In this paper, we develop three overall compression architectures based on convolutional autoencoders (CAEs), generative adversarial networks (GANs) as well as super-resolution (SR), and present a comprehensive performance comparison. According to experimental results, CAEs achieve better coding efficiency than JPEG by extracting compact features. GANs show potential advantages on large compression…
Huawei Hong Kong Research Center（华为香港研究中心）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；HKUST Shenzhen-Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Research Institute（香港科技大学深港协同创新研究院）
Neural-network-based approaches recently emerged in the field of data compression and have already led to significant progress in image compression, especially in achieving a higher compression ratio. In the lossless image compression scenario, however, existing methods often struggle to learn a probability model of full-size high-resolution images due to the limitation of the computation source. The current strategy is to crop high-resolution images into multiple non-overlapping patches and process them independently. This strategy ignores long-term dependencies beyond patches, thus limiting …
We propose a unified signal compression framework that uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) to compress heterogeneous signals. The compressed signal is represented as a latent vector and fed into a generator network that is trained to produce high quality realistic signals that minimize a target objective function. To efficiently quantize the compressed signal, non-uniformly quantized optimal latent vectors are identified by iterative back-propagation with alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) optimization performed for each iteration. The performance of the proposed signal…
Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；Disney Research LA（迪士尼研究院洛杉矶）；DisneyResearch|Studios（迪士尼研究工作室）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
The usage of deep generative models for image compression has led to impressive performance gains over classical codecs while neural video compression is still in its infancy. Here, we propose an end-to-end, deep generative modeling approach to compress temporal sequences with a focus on video. Our approach builds upon variational autoencoder (VAE) models for sequential data and combines them with recent work on neural image compression. The approach jointly learns to transform the original sequence into a lower-dimensional representation as well as to discretize and entropy code this represen…
Under the limited storage, computing and network bandwidth resources, the video compression coding technology plays an important role for visual communication. To efficiently compress raw video data, a colorization-based video compression coding method is proposed in this paper. In the proposed encoder, only the video luminance components are encoded and transmitted. To restore the video chrominance information, a generative adversarial network (GAN) model is adopted in the proposed decoder. In order to make the GAN work efficiently for video colorization, the generator of the proposed GAN mod…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（韩国电子通信研究院）
Recently, many neural network-based image compression methods have shown promising results superior to the existing tool-based conventional codecs. However, most of them are often trained as separate models for different target bit rates, thus increasing the model complexity. Therefore, several studies have been conducted for learned compression that supports variable rates with single models, but they require additional network modules, layers, or inputs that often lead to complexity overhead, or do not provide sufficient coding efficiency. In this paper, we firstly propose a selective compre…
As the latest video coding standard, versatile video coding (VVC) has shown its ability in retaining pixel quality. To excavate more compression potential for video conference scenarios under ultra-low bitrate, this paper proposes a bitrate adjustable hybrid compression scheme for face video. This hybrid scheme combines the pixel-level precise recovery capability of traditional coding with the generation capability of deep learning based on abridged information, where Pixel wise Bi-Prediction, Low-Bitrate-FOM and Lossless Keypoint Encoder collaborate to achieve PSNR up to 36.23 dB at a low bit…
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have seen widespread use in learned image compression. They are used to learn expressive latent representations on which downstream compression methods can operate with high efficiency. Recently proposed 'bits-back' methods can indirectly encode the latent representation of images with codelength close to the relative entropy between the latent posterior and the prior. However, due to the underlying algorithm, these methods can only be used for lossless compression, and they only achieve their nominal efficiency when compressing multiple images simultaneously; t…
In this paper, we propose to enhance learned image compression systems with a richer probability model for the latent variables. Previous works model the latents with a Gaussian or a Laplace distribution. Inspired by binary arithmetic coding , we propose to signal the latents with three binary values and one integer, with different probability models. A relaxation method is designed to perform gradient-based training. The richer probability model results in a better entropy coding leading to lower rate. Experiments under the Challenge on Learned Image Compression (CLIC) test conditions demonst…
Image compression is an essential approach for decreasing the size in bytes of the image without deteriorating the quality of it. Typically, classic algorithms are used but recently deep-learning has been successfully applied. In this work, is presented a deep super-resolution work-flow for image compression that maps low-resolution JPEG image to the high-resolution. The pipeline consists of two components: first, an encoder-decoder neural network learns how to transform the downsampling JPEG images to high resolution. Second, a combination between Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and re…
