Deep Optimized Multiple Description Image Coding via Scalar Quantization Learning

In this paper, we introduce a deep multiple description coding (MDC) framework optimized by minimizing multiple description (MD) compressive loss. First, MD multi-scale-dilated encoder network generates multiple description tensors, which are discretized by scalar quantizers, while these quantized tensors are decompressed by MD cascaded-ResBlock decoder networks. To greatly reduce the total amount of artificial neural network parameters, an auto-encoder network composed of these two types of network is designed as a symmetrical parameter sharing structure. Second, this autoencoder network and a pair of scalar quantizers are simultaneously learned in an end-to-end self-supervised way. Third, considering the variation in the image spatial distribution, each scalar quantizer is accompanied by an importance-indicator map to generate MD tensors, rather than using direct quantization. Fourth, we introduce the multiple description structural similarity distance loss, which implicitly regularizes the diversified multiple description generations, to explicitly supervise multiple description diversified decoding in addition to MD reconstruction loss. Finally, we demonstrate that our MDC framework performs better than several state-of-the-art MDC approaches regarding image coding efficiency when tested on several commonly available datasets.