Exploiting Latent Properties to Optimize Neural Codecs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Balcilar, Muhammet, Damodaran, Bharath Bhushan, Naser, Karam, Galpin, Franck, Hellier, Pierre
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Balcilar, Muhammet
Damodaran, Bharath Bhushan
Naser, Karam
Galpin, Franck
Hellier, Pierre
author_facet Balcilar, Muhammet
Damodaran, Bharath Bhushan
Naser, Karam
Galpin, Franck
Hellier, Pierre
contents End-to-end image and video codecs are becoming increasingly competitive, compared to traditional compression techniques that have been developed through decades of manual engineering efforts. These trainable codecs have many advantages over traditional techniques, such as their straightforward adaptation to perceptual distortion metrics and high performance in specific fields thanks to their learning ability. However, current state-of-the-art neural codecs do not fully exploit the benefits of vector quantization and the existence of the entropy gradient in decoding devices. In this paper, we propose to leverage these two properties (vector quantization and entropy gradient) to improve the performance of off-the-shelf codecs. Firstly, we demonstrate that using non-uniform scalar quantization cannot improve performance over uniform quantization. We thus suggest using predefined optimal uniform vector quantization to improve performance. Secondly, we show that the entropy gradient, available at the decoder, is correlated with the reconstruction error gradient, which is not available at the decoder. We therefore use the former as a proxy to enhance compression performance. Our experimental results show that these approaches save between 1 to 3% of the rate for the same quality across various pretrained methods. In addition, the entropy gradient based solution improves traditional codec performance significantly as well.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01231
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploiting Latent Properties to Optimize Neural Codecs
Balcilar, Muhammet
Damodaran, Bharath Bhushan
Naser, Karam
Galpin, Franck
Hellier, Pierre
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
68T07
I.4.2
End-to-end image and video codecs are becoming increasingly competitive, compared to traditional compression techniques that have been developed through decades of manual engineering efforts. These trainable codecs have many advantages over traditional techniques, such as their straightforward adaptation to perceptual distortion metrics and high performance in specific fields thanks to their learning ability. However, current state-of-the-art neural codecs do not fully exploit the benefits of vector quantization and the existence of the entropy gradient in decoding devices. In this paper, we propose to leverage these two properties (vector quantization and entropy gradient) to improve the performance of off-the-shelf codecs. Firstly, we demonstrate that using non-uniform scalar quantization cannot improve performance over uniform quantization. We thus suggest using predefined optimal uniform vector quantization to improve performance. Secondly, we show that the entropy gradient, available at the decoder, is correlated with the reconstruction error gradient, which is not available at the decoder. We therefore use the former as a proxy to enhance compression performance. Our experimental results show that these approaches save between 1 to 3% of the rate for the same quality across various pretrained methods. In addition, the entropy gradient based solution improves traditional codec performance significantly as well.
title Exploiting Latent Properties to Optimize Neural Codecs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
68T07
I.4.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01231