Variable rate deep image compression with modulated autoencoder

Variable rate is a requirement for flexible and adaptable image and video compression. However, deep image compression methods (DIC) are optimized for a single fixed rate-distortion (R-D) tradeoff. While this can be addressed by training multiple models for different tradeoffs, the memory requiremen...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Yang, Fei|||0000-0003-4099-6511, Herranz, Luis|||0000-0002-7022-3395, Weijer, Joost van de|||0000-0002-9656-9706, Iglesias-Guitian, Jose A.|||0000-0002-0817-1010, López Peña, Antonio M.|||0000-0002-6979-5783, Mozerov, Mikhail|||0000-0002-1117-743X
Format: article
Publication Date:2020
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repository:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:274829
Online Access:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/274829
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.1109/LSP.2020.2970539
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Bit rate
Decoding
Training
Image coding
Distortion
Quantization (signal)
Adaptation models
Description
Summary:Variable rate is a requirement for flexible and adaptable image and video compression. However, deep image compression methods (DIC) are optimized for a single fixed rate-distortion (R-D) tradeoff. While this can be addressed by training multiple models for different tradeoffs, the memory requirements increase proportionally to the number of models. Scaling the bottleneck representation of a shared autoencoder can provide variable rate compression with a single shared autoencoder. However, the R-D performance using this simple mechanism degrades in low bitrates, and also shrinks the effective range of bitrates. To address these limitations, we formulate the problem of variable R-D optimization for DIC, and propose modulated autoencoders (MAEs), where the representations of a shared autoencoder are adapted to the specific R-D tradeoff via a modulation network. Jointly training this modulated autoencoder and the modulation network provides an effective way to navigate the R-D operational curve. Our experiments show that the proposed method can achieve almost the same R-D performance of independent models with significantly fewer parameters.