Generative Refinement for Low Bitrate Image Coding Using Vector Quantized Residual
IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems(2024)
摘要
Despite the significant progress in recent deep learning-based image compression, the reconstructed visual quality still suffers at low bitrates due to the lack of high-frequency information. Existing methods deploy the generative adversarial networks (GANs) as an additional loss to supervise the rate-distortion (R-D) optimization, capable of producing more high-frequency components for visually pleasing reconstruction but also introducing unexpected fake textures. This work, instead, proposes to generate high-frequency residuals to refine an image reconstruction compressed using existing image compression solutions. Such a residual signal is calculated between the decoded image and its uncompressed input and quantized to proper codeword vectors in a learnable codebook for decoder-side generative refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can restore high-frequency information given images compressed by any codecs and outperform the state-of-the-art generative image compression algorithms or perceptual-oriented post-processing approaches. Moreover, the proposed method using vector quantized residual exhibits remarkable robustness and generalizes to both rules-based and learning-based compression models, which can be used as a plug-and-play module for perceptual optimization without re-training.
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关键词
Learned image compression,residual refinement,vector quantization,generative adversarial network
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