Full Resolution Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks
01 Jul 2017-pp 5435-5443
TL;DR: This is the first neural network architecture that is able to outperform JPEG at image compression across most bitrates on the rate-distortion curve on the Kodak dataset images, with and without the aid of entropy coding.
Abstract: This paper presents a set of full-resolution lossy image compression methods based on neural networks. Each of the architectures we describe can provide variable compression rates during deployment without requiring retraining of the network: each network need only be trained once. All of our architectures consist of a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based encoder and decoder, a binarizer, and a neural network for entropy coding. We compare RNN types (LSTM, associative LSTM) and introduce a new hybrid of GRU and ResNet. We also study one-shot versus additive reconstruction architectures and introduce a new scaled-additive framework. We compare to previous work, showing improvements of 4.3%–8.8% AUC (area under the rate-distortion curve), depending on the perceptual metric used. As far as we know, this is the first neural network architecture that is able to outperform JPEG at image compression across most bitrates on the rate-distortion curve on the Kodak dataset images, with and without the aid of entropy coding.
Citations
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21 Jul 2017
TL;DR: SRGAN as mentioned in this paper proposes a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss, which pushes the solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images.
Abstract: Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.
6,884 citations
15 Jun 2019
TL;DR: This paper proposes the first end-to-end video compression deep model that jointly optimizes all the components for video compression, and shows that the proposed approach can outperform the widely used video coding standard H.264 in terms of PSNR and be even on par with the latest standard MS-SSIM.
Abstract: Conventional video compression approaches use the predictive coding architecture and encode the corresponding motion information and residual information. In this paper, taking advantage of both classical architecture in the conventional video compression method and the powerful non-linear representation ability of neural networks, we propose the first end-to-end video compression deep model that jointly optimizes all the components for video compression. Specifically, learning based optical flow estimation is utilized to obtain the motion information and reconstruct the current frames. Then we employ two auto-encoder style neural networks to compress the corresponding motion and residual information. All the modules are jointly learned through a single loss function, in which they collaborate with each other by considering the trade-off between reducing the number of compression bits and improving quality of the decoded video. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can outperform the widely used video coding standard H.264 in terms of PSNR and be even on par with the latest standard H.265 in terms of MS-SSIM. Code is released at https://github.com/GuoLusjtu/DVC.
459 citations
Cites methods from "Full Resolution Image Compression w..."
...To optimize the neural network, the work in [34, 35, 19] only tried to minimize the distortion (e....
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...Recently, deep neural network (DNN) based autoencoder for image compression [34, 11, 35, 8, 12, 19, 33, 21, 28, 9] has achieved comparable or even better performance than the traditional image codecs like JPEG [37], JPEG2000 [29] or BPG [1]....
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...In [34, 35, 19], recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are utilized to build a progressive image compression scheme....
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...Recently, DNN based image compression methods have attracted more and more attention [34, 35, 11, 12, 33, 8, 21, 28, 24, 9]....
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18 Jun 2018
TL;DR: In this article, a 3D-CNN is used to learn a conditional probability model of the latent distribution of the auto-encoder during training, and the context model is updated to learn the dependencies between the symbols in the latent representation.
Abstract: Deep Neural Networks trained as image auto-encoders have recently emerged as a promising direction for advancing the state-of-the-art in image compression. The key challenge in learning such networks is twofold: To deal with quantization, and to control the trade-off between reconstruction error (distortion) and entropy (rate) of the latent image representation. In this paper, we focus on the latter challenge and propose a new technique to navigate the rate-distortion trade-off for an image compression auto-encoder. The main idea is to directly model the entropy of the latent representation by using a context model: A 3D-CNN which learns a conditional probability model of the latent distribution of the auto-encoder. During training, the auto-encoder makes use of the context model to estimate the entropy of its representation, and the context model is concurrently updated to learn the dependencies between the symbols in the latent representation. Our experiments show that this approach, when measured in MS-SSIM, yields a state-of-the-art image compression system based on a simple convolutional auto-encoder.
410 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: It is found that in terms of compression performance, autoregressive and hierarchical priors are complementary and can be combined to exploit the probabilistic structure in the latents better than all previous learned models.
Abstract: Recent models for learned image compression are based on autoencoders, learning approximately invertible mappings from pixels to a quantized latent representation. These are combined with an entropy model, a prior on the latent representation that can be used with standard arithmetic coding algorithms to yield a compressed bitstream. Recently, hierarchical entropy models have been introduced as a way to exploit more structure in the latents than simple fully factorized priors, improving compression performance while maintaining end-to-end optimization. Inspired by the success of autoregressive priors in probabilistic generative models, we examine autoregressive, hierarchical, as well as combined priors as alternatives, weighing their costs and benefits in the context of image compression. While it is well known that autoregressive models come with a significant computational penalty, we find that in terms of compression performance, autoregressive and hierarchical priors are complementary and, together, exploit the probabilistic structure in the latents better than all previous learned models. The combined model yields state-of-the-art rate--distortion performance, providing a 15.8% average reduction in file size over the previous state-of-the-art method based on deep learning, which corresponds to a 59.8% size reduction over JPEG, more than 35% reduction compared to WebP and JPEG2000, and bitstreams 8.4% smaller than BPG, the current state-of-the-art image codec. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first learning-based method to outperform BPG on both PSNR and MS-SSIM distortion metrics.
391 citations
Cites background or methods from "Full Resolution Image Compression w..."
...To improve compression performance, recent methods have focused on better encoder/decoder transforms and on more sophisticated entropy models [4]–[14]....
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...Some use a fully factorized entropy model [5], [6], while others make use of context in code space to improve compression rates [4], [7]–[9], [12], [35]....
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...Their approach was improved by exploring other recurrent architectures for the autoencoder, training an LSTM-based entropy model, and adding a post-process that spatially adapts the bit rate based on the complexity of the local image content [4], [8]....
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Proceedings Article•
03 Dec 2018TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare the performance of autoregressive, hierarchical, and combined priors in the context of image compression and find that in terms of compression performance, autoregression and hierarchical priors are complementary and can be combined to exploit the probabilistic structure in the latents better than all previous learned models.
Abstract: Recent models for learned image compression are based on autoencoders that learn approximately invertible mappings from pixels to a quantized latent representation. The transforms are combined with an entropy model, which is a prior on the latent representation that can be used with standard arithmetic coding algorithms to generate a compressed bitstream. Recently, hierarchical entropy models were introduced as a way to exploit more structure in the latents than previous fully factorized priors, improving compression performance while maintaining end-to-end optimization. Inspired by the success of autoregressive priors in probabilistic generative models, we examine autoregressive, hierarchical, and combined priors as alternatives, weighing their costs and benefits in the context of image compression. While it is well known that autoregressive models can incur a significant computational penalty, we find that in terms of compression performance, autoregressive and hierarchical priors are complementary and can be combined to exploit the probabilistic structure in the latents better than all previous learned models. The combined model yields state-of-the-art rate–distortion performance and generates smaller files than existing methods: 15.8% rate reductions over the baseline hierarchical model and 59.8%, 35%, and 8.4% savings over JPEG, JPEG2000, and BPG, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first learning-based method to outperform the top standard image codec (BPG) on both the PSNR and MS-SSIM distortion metrics.
355 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, an effective way of initializing the weights that allows deep autoencoder networks to learn low-dimensional codes that work much better than principal components analysis as a tool to reduce the dimensionality of data is described.
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