Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Careil, Marlène, Muckley, Matthew J., Verbeek, Jakob, Lathuilière, Stéphane
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Careil, Marlène
Muckley, Matthew J.
Verbeek, Jakob
Lathuilière, Stéphane
author_facet Careil, Marlène
Muckley, Matthew J.
Verbeek, Jakob
Lathuilière, Stéphane
contents Image codecs are typically optimized to trade-off bitrate \vs distortion metrics. At low bitrates, this leads to compression artefacts which are easily perceptible, even when training with perceptual or adversarial losses. To improve image quality and remove dependency on the bitrate, we propose to decode with iterative diffusion models. We condition the decoding process on a vector-quantized image representation, as well as a global image description to provide additional context. We dub our model PerCo for 'perceptual compression', and compare it to state-of-the-art codecs at rates from 0.1 down to 0.003 bits per pixel. The latter rate is more than an order of magnitude smaller than those considered in most prior work, compressing a 512x768 Kodak image with less than 153 bytes. Despite this ultra-low bitrate, our approach maintains the ability to reconstruct realistic images. We find that our model leads to reconstructions with state-of-the-art visual quality as measured by FID and KID. As predicted by rate-distortion-perception theory, visual quality is less dependent on the bitrate than previous methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_10325
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates
Careil, Marlène
Muckley, Matthew J.
Verbeek, Jakob
Lathuilière, Stéphane
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Image codecs are typically optimized to trade-off bitrate \vs distortion metrics. At low bitrates, this leads to compression artefacts which are easily perceptible, even when training with perceptual or adversarial losses. To improve image quality and remove dependency on the bitrate, we propose to decode with iterative diffusion models. We condition the decoding process on a vector-quantized image representation, as well as a global image description to provide additional context. We dub our model PerCo for 'perceptual compression', and compare it to state-of-the-art codecs at rates from 0.1 down to 0.003 bits per pixel. The latter rate is more than an order of magnitude smaller than those considered in most prior work, compressing a 512x768 Kodak image with less than 153 bytes. Despite this ultra-low bitrate, our approach maintains the ability to reconstruct realistic images. We find that our model leads to reconstructions with state-of-the-art visual quality as measured by FID and KID. As predicted by rate-distortion-perception theory, visual quality is less dependent on the bitrate than previous methods.
title Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10325