The existing image compression methods are mainly aimed at human perception tasks instead of machine vision tasks. Rich features learned by the shallow and deep layers of pre-trained visual geometry group (VGG)-net can serve human perception and machine vision tasks, respectively. To improve the machine analysis capabilities of the human-targeted compression method, we propose a scalable image compression framework at low bit-rates. Specifically, the scalable compression framework is composed of a base layer (BL) and an enhancement layer (EL), which utilize the correlation between the above features to perform machine analysis and human perception tasks, respectively. For effectively utilizing the above two types of features, a multi-branch shared module that utilizes the complementarity of multi-branch convolution kernels to retain compact information for the above features to support BL and EL tasks is proposed. In addition, for further improving the accuracy of machine analysis, the machine-vision importance map is introduced in BL; it adaptively utilizes the spatial and channel information from the deepest layer of VGG-net to guide local bit allocation. When the bit-rate is limited to 0.2 bpp, the average recognition accuracy (Top-1) of the BL of proposed method is 5.2%, 13.4%, 6.0%, and 7.4% higher than that of BPG, Webp, Mentzer, and NIC, respectively, on the ILSVRC2012 verification dataset. Meanwhile, the EL provides good visual experience. |
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CITATIONS
Cited by 1 scholarly publication.
Image compression
Machine vision
Human vision and color perception
Electroluminescence
Visual process modeling
Convolution
Visualization