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Better Compression with Deep Pre-Editing (arxiv.org)
1 point by Katydid on Feb 8, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Before sending an image to a standard compressor, a trained network gently edits its content so it fits the allotted bits without ugly artifacts. With JPEG, this saved bits and looked better than compressing the untouched image.

Abstract

Could we compress images via standard codecs while avoiding visible artifacts? The answer is obvious -- this is doable as long as the bit budget is generous enough. What if the allocated bit-rate for compression is insufficient? Then unfortunately, artifacts are a fact of life. Many attempts were made over the years to fight this phenomenon, with various degrees of success. In this work we aim to break the unholy connection between bit-rate and image quality, and propose a way to circumvent compression artifacts by pre-editing the incoming image and modifying its content to fit the given bits. We design this editing operation as a learned convolutional neural network, and formulate an optimization problem for its training. Our loss takes into account a proximity between the original image and the edited one, a bit-budget penalty over the proposed image, and a no-reference image quality measure for forcing the outcome to be visually pleasing. The proposed approach is demonstrated on the popular JPEG compression, showing savings in bits and/or improvements in visual quality, obtained with intricate editing effects.

Hossein Talebi, Damien Kelly, Xiyang Luo, Ignacio Garcia Dorado, Feng Yang, Peyman Milanfar, Michael Elad
arXiv:2002.00113 · eess.IV, cs.CV · submitted Feb 1, 2020 · updated Jul 23, 2021
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