论文标题
在有损图像压缩中建模丢失的信息
Modeling Lost Information in Lossy Image Compression
论文作者
论文摘要
有损图像压缩是数字图像最常用的操作员之一。最近提出的基于深度学习的图像压缩方法利用自动编码器结构,并在该领域达到一系列有希望的结果。这些图像首先编码为低维的潜在特征,然后通过利用统计冗余而对熵进行编码。但是,不幸的是,在编码过程中丢失的信息是不可避免的,这对解码器重建原始图像构成了重大挑战。在这项工作中,我们提出了一个新型的可逆框架,称为可逆损耗压缩(ILC),以大大减轻信息损失问题。具体而言,ILC引入了可逆编码模块,以替换编码器折叠结构,以产生低维的潜在表示,同时将丢失的信息转换为辅助的潜在变量,该变量将不会进一步编码或存储。对潜在表示并编码为位流,并且潜在变量被迫遵循指定的分布,即各向异性高斯分布。这样,通过轻松绘制替代潜在变量并使用采样变量和解码的潜在特征应用模块的倒数通过,可以使恢复原始图像恢复。实验结果表明,通过在图像压缩方法中取代自动编码器的新组件,ILC可以通过与现有的压缩算法结合使用广泛的基准数据集上的基线方法显着优于基线方法。
Lossy image compression is one of the most commonly used operators for digital images. Most recently proposed deep-learning-based image compression methods leverage the auto-encoder structure, and reach a series of promising results in this field. The images are encoded into low dimensional latent features first, and entropy coded subsequently by exploiting the statistical redundancy. However, the information lost during encoding is unfortunately inevitable, which poses a significant challenge to the decoder to reconstruct the original images. In this work, we propose a novel invertible framework called Invertible Lossy Compression (ILC) to largely mitigate the information loss problem. Specifically, ILC introduces an invertible encoding module to replace the encoder-decoder structure to produce the low dimensional informative latent representation, meanwhile, transform the lost information into an auxiliary latent variable that won't be further coded or stored. The latent representation is quantized and encoded into bit-stream, and the latent variable is forced to follow a specified distribution, i.e. isotropic Gaussian distribution. In this way, recovering the original image is made tractable by easily drawing a surrogate latent variable and applying the inverse pass of the module with the sampled variable and decoded latent features. Experimental results demonstrate that with a new component replacing the auto-encoder in image compression methods, ILC can significantly outperform the baseline method on extensive benchmark datasets by combining with the existing compression algorithms.