论文标题
高保真可变速率图像通过可逆激活变换压缩
High-Fidelity Variable-Rate Image Compression via Invertible Activation Transformation
论文作者
论文摘要
基于学习的方法有效地促进了图像压缩社区。同时,基于变异的自动编码器(VAE)的可变速率方法最近引起了很多关注,以避免使用一组不同的网络来用于各种压缩率。尽管已经取得了显着的性能,但一旦执行多个压缩/减压操作,这些方法将很容易损坏,从而导致图像质量将被大量降低并且会出现强大的伪影。因此,我们试图解决高保真可变速率图像压缩的问题,并提出可逆激活变换(IAT)模块。我们以单个速率可逆神经网络(INN)模型(QLevel)以数学可逆的方式实施IAT,并将质量级别(QLevel)送入IAT,以产生缩放和偏置张量。 IAT和QLevel共同使图像压缩模型具有罚款可变速率控制的能力,同时更好地维护图像保真度。广泛的实验表明,配备了我们IAT模块的单率图像压缩模型具有实现可变速率控制的能力而无需任何妥协。而我们的IAT限制模型则通过最新的基于学习的图像压缩方法获得了可比的速率延伸性能。此外,我们的方法的表现优于最新的可变速率图像压缩方法,尤其是在多次重新编码之后。
Learning-based methods have effectively promoted the community of image compression. Meanwhile, variational autoencoder (VAE) based variable-rate approaches have recently gained much attention to avoid the usage of a set of different networks for various compression rates. Despite the remarkable performance that has been achieved, these approaches would be readily corrupted once multiple compression/decompression operations are executed, resulting in the fact that image quality would be tremendously dropped and strong artifacts would appear. Thus, we try to tackle the issue of high-fidelity fine variable-rate image compression and propose the Invertible Activation Transformation (IAT) module. We implement the IAT in a mathematical invertible manner on a single rate Invertible Neural Network (INN) based model and the quality level (QLevel) would be fed into the IAT to generate scaling and bias tensors. IAT and QLevel together give the image compression model the ability of fine variable-rate control while better maintaining the image fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the single rate image compression model equipped with our IAT module has the ability to achieve variable-rate control without any compromise. And our IAT-embedded model obtains comparable rate-distortion performance with recent learning-based image compression methods. Furthermore, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art variable-rate image compression method by a large margin, especially after multiple re-encodings.