Title
IMAGE CODING FOR MACHINES: AN END-TO-END LEARNED APPROACH
Abstract
Over recent years, deep learning-based computer vision systems have been applied to images at an ever-increasing pace, oftentimes representing the only type of consumption for those images. Given the dramatic explosion in the number of images generated per day, a question arises: how much better would an image codec targeting machine-consumption perform against state-of-the-art codecs targeting human-consumption? In this paper, we propose an image codec for machines which is neural network (NN) based and end-to-end learned. In particular, we propose a set of training strategies that address the delicate problem of balancing competing loss functions, such as computer vision task losses, image distortion losses, and rate loss. Our experimental results show that our NN-based codec outperforms the state-of-the-art Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard on the object detection and instance segmentation tasks, achieving -37.87% and -32.90% of BD-rate gain, respectively, while being fast thanks to its compact size. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end learned machine-targeted image codec.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ICASSP39728.2021.9414465
2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH AND SIGNAL PROCESSING (ICASSP 2021)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
image coding for machines, image compression, loss weighting, multitask learning, video coding for machines
Conference
2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP2021), 2021, pp. 1590-1594
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nam D. Le135.44
Zhang Honglei200.68
Francesco Cricri36411.77
Ramin Ghaznavi Youvalari483.66
Esa Rahtu583252.76