Task-Aware Encoder Control for Deep Video Compression

Prior research on deep video compression (DVC) for machine tasks typically necessitates training a unique codec for each specific task, mandating a dedicated decoder per task. In contrast, traditional video codecs employ a flexible encoder controller, enabling the adaptation of a single codec to different tasks through mechanisms like mode prediction. Drawing inspiration from this, we introduce an innovative encoder controller for deep video compression for machines. This controller features a mode prediction and a Group of Pictures (GoP) selection module. Our approach centralizes control at the encoding stage, allowing for adaptable encoder adjustments across different tasks, such as detection and tracking, while maintaining compatibility with a standard pre-trained DVC decoder. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our method is applicable across multiple tasks with various existing pre-trained DVCs. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous DVC by about 25% bitrate for different tasks, with only one pre-trained decoder.

Content-aware Masked Image Modeling Transformer for Stereo Image Compression

Existing learning-based stereo image codec adopt sophisticated transformation with simple entropy models derived from single image codecs to encode latent representations. However, those entropy models struggle to effectively capture the spatial-disparity characteristics inherent in stereo images, which leads to suboptimal rate-distortion results. In this paper, we propose a stereo image compression framework, named CAMSIC. CAMSIC independently transforms each image to latent representation and employs a powerful decoder-free Transformer entropy model to capture both spatial and disparity dependencies, by introducing a novel content-aware masked image modeling (MIM) technique. Our content-aware MIM facilitates efficient bidirectional interaction between prior information and estimated tokens, which naturally obviates the need for an extra Transformer decoder. Experiments show that our stereo image codec achieves state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance on two stereo image datasets Cityscapes and InStereo2K with fast encoding and decoding speed.

GaussianImage: 1000 FPS Image Representation and Compression by 2D Gaussian Splatting

Implicit neural representations (INRs) recently achieved great success in image representation and compression, offering high visual quality and fast rendering speeds with 10-1000 FPS, assuming sufficient GPU resources are available. However, this requirement often hinders their use on low-end devices with limited memory. In response, we propose a groundbreaking paradigm of image representation and compression by 2D Gaussian Splatting, named GaussianImage. We first introduce 2D Gaussian to represent the image, where each Gaussian has 8 parameters including position, covariance and color. Subsequently, we unveil a novel rendering algorithm based on accumulated summation. Remarkably, our method with a minimum of 3$\times$ lower GPU memory usage and 5$\times$ faster fitting time not only rivals INRs (e.g., WIRE, I-NGP) in representation performance, but also delivers a faster rendering speed of 1500-2000 FPS regardless of parameter size. Furthermore, we integrate existing vector quantization technique to build an image codec. Experimental results demonstrate that our codec attains rate-distortion performance comparable to compression-based INRs such as COIN and COIN++, while facilitating decoding speeds of approximately 1000 FPS. Additionally, preliminary proof of concept shows that our codec surpasses COIN and COIN++ in performance when using partial bits-back coding.

Boosting Neural Representations for Videos with a Conditional Decoder

Implicit neural representations (INRs) have emerged as a promising approach for video storage and processing, showing remarkable versatility across various video tasks. However, existing methods often fail to fully leverage their representation capabilities, primarily due to inadequate alignment of intermediate features during target frame decoding. This paper introduces a universal boosting framework for current implicit video representation approaches. Specifically, we utilize a conditional decoder with a temporal-aware affine transform module, which uses the frame index as a prior condition to effectively align intermediate features with target frames. Besides, we introduce a sinusoidal NeRV-like block to generate diverse intermediate features and achieve a more balanced parameter distribution, thereby enhancing the model's capacity. With a high-frequency information-preserving reconstruction loss, our approach successfully boosts multiple baseline INRs in the reconstruction quality and convergence speed for video regression, and exhibits superior inpainting and interpolation results. Further, we integrate a consistent entropy minimization technique and develop video codecs based on these boosted INRs. Experiments on the UVG dataset confirm that our enhanced codecs significantly outperform baseline INRs and offer competitive rate-distortion performance compared to traditional and learning-based codecs.

Preprocessing Enhanced Image Compression for Machine Vision

Recently, more and more images are compressed and sent to the back-end devices for the machine analysis tasks~(\textit{e.g.,} object detection) instead of being purely watched by humans. However, most traditional or learned image codecs are designed to minimize the distortion of the human visual system without considering the increased demand from machine vision systems. In this work, we propose a preprocessing enhanced image compression method for machine vision tasks to address this challenge. Instead of relying on the learned image codecs for end-to-end optimization, our framework is built upon the traditional non-differential codecs, which means it is standard compatible and can be easily deployed in practical applications. Specifically, we propose a neural preprocessing module before the encoder to maintain the useful semantic information for the downstream tasks and suppress the irrelevant information for bitrate saving. Furthermore, our neural preprocessing module is quantization adaptive and can be used in different compression ratios. More importantly, to jointly optimize the preprocessing module with the downstream machine vision tasks, we introduce the proxy network for the traditional non-differential codecs in the back-propagation stage. We provide extensive experiments by evaluating our compression method for two representative downstream tasks with different backbone networks. Experimental results show our method achieves a better trade-off between the coding bitrate and the performance of the downstream machine vision tasks by saving about 20% bitrate.