English

Full Resolution Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2017-07-10 v2

Abstract

This paper presents a set of full-resolution lossy image compression methods based on neural networks. Each of the architectures we describe can provide variable compression rates during deployment without requiring retraining of the network: each network need only be trained once. All of our architectures consist of a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based encoder and decoder, a binarizer, and a neural network for entropy coding. We compare RNN types (LSTM, associative LSTM) and introduce a new hybrid of GRU and ResNet. We also study "one-shot" versus additive reconstruction architectures and introduce a new scaled-additive framework. We compare to previous work, showing improvements of 4.3%-8.8% AUC (area under the rate-distortion curve), depending on the perceptual metric used. As far as we know, this is the first neural network architecture that is able to outperform JPEG at image compression across most bitrates on the rate-distortion curve on the Kodak dataset images, with and without the aid of entropy coding.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.05148,
  title  = {Full Resolution Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks},
  author = {George Toderici and Damien Vincent and Nick Johnston and Sung Jin Hwang and David Minnen and Joel Shor and Michele Covell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.05148},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Updated with content for CVPR and removed supplemental material to an external link for size limitations

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:22:55.127Z