A unified efficient deep image compression framework and its application on human-centric Task

Image compression is a widely used technique to reduce the spatial redundancy in images. Recently, learning based image compression has achieved significant progress by using the powerful representation ability from neural networks. However, the current learning based image compression methods suffer from the huge computational cost, which limits their capacity for practical applications. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called Efficient Deep Image Compression (EDIC) based on three new technologies, including a channel attention module, a Gaussian mixture model and a decoder-side enhancement module. Specifically, we design an auto-encoder style network for learning based image compression. To improve the coding efficiency, we exploit the channel relationship between latent representations by using the channel attention module. Besides, the Gaussian mixture model is introduced for the entropy model and improves the accuracy for bitrate estimation. Furthermore, we introduce the decoder-side enhancement module to further improve image compression performance. Our EDIC method can also be readily incorporated with the Deep Video Compression (DVC) framework (Lu et al. 2019) to further improve the video compression performance. Simultaneously, our EDIC method boosts the coding performance significantly while bringing slightly increased computational cost. More importantly, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current image compression methods and is up to more than 150 times faster in terms of decoding speed when compared with Minnen’s method (Minnen et al. 2018). Moreover, we also evaluate the performance of the human-centric task (i.e., face recognition) by using different coding strategies.