Motivated by recent work on deep neural network (DNN)-based image compression methods showing potential improvements in image quality, savings in storage, and bandwidth reduction, we propose to perform image understanding tasks such as classification and segmentation directly on the compressed representations produced by these compression methods. Since the encoders and decoders in DNN-based compression methods are neural networks with feature-maps as internal representations of the images, we directly integrate these with architectures for image understanding. This bypasses decoding of the compressed representation into RGB space and reduces computational cost. Our study shows that accuracies comparable to networks that operate on compressed RGB images can be achieved while reducing the computational complexity up to @math . Furthermore, we show that synergies are obtained by jointly training compression networks with classification networks on the compressed representations, improving image quality, classification accuracy, and segmentation performance. We find that inference from compressed representations is particularly advantageous compared to inference from compressed RGB images for aggressive compression rates.
@cite_1: A large fraction of Internet traffic is now driven by requests from mobile devices with relatively small screens and often stringent bandwidth requirements. Due to these factors, it has become the norm for modern graphics-heavy websites to transmit low-resolution, low-bytecount image previews (thumbnails) as part of the initial page load process to improve apparent page responsiveness. Increasing thumbnail compression beyond the capabilities of existing codecs is therefore a current research focus, as any byte savings will significantly enhance the experience of mobile device users. Toward this end, we propose a general framework for variable-rate image compression and a novel architecture based on convolutional and deconvolutional LSTM recurrent networks. Our models address the main issues that have prevented autoencoder neural networks from competing with existing image compression algorithms: (1) our networks only need to be trained once (not per-image), regardless of input image dimensions and the desired compression rate; (2) our networks are progressive, meaning that the more bits are sent, the more accurate the image reconstruction; and (3) the proposed architecture is at least as efficient as a standard purpose-trained autoencoder for a given number of bits. On a large-scale benchmark of 32 @math 32 thumbnails, our LSTM-based approaches provide better visual quality than (headerless) JPEG, JPEG2000 and WebP, with a storage size that is reduced by 10 or more.
@cite_7: The rapid growth of digital libraries, e-governance, and internet based applications has caused an exponential escalation in the volume of ‘Big-data’ particularly due to texts, images, audios and videos that are being both archived and transmitted on a daily basis. In order to make their storage and transfer efficient, different data compression techniques are used in the literature. The ultimate motive behind data compression is to transform a big size data into small size data, which eventually implies less space while archiving, and less time in transferring. However, in order to operate analyze compressed data, it is usually necessary to decompress it, so as to bring back the data to its original form, which unfortunately warrants an additional computing cost. In this backdrop, if operating upon the compressed data itself can be made possible without going through the stage of decompression, then the advantage that could be accomplished due to compression would escalate. Further due to compression, from the data structure and storage perspectives, the original visibility structure of the data also being lost, it turns into a potential challenge to trace the original information in the compressed representation. This challenge is the motivation behind exploring the idea of direct processing on the compressed data itself in the literature. The proposed survey paper specifically focuses on compressed document images and brings out two original contributions. The first contribution is that it presents a critical study on different image analysis and image compression techniques, and highlights the motivational reasons for pursuing document image analysis in the compressed domain. The second contribution is that it summarizes the different compressed domain techniques in the literature so far based on the type of compression and operations performed by them. Overall, the paper aims to provide a perspective for pursuing further research in the area of document image analysis and pattern recognition directly based on the compressed data.
In the literature there are a few examples of learning from features extracted from images compressed by codecs. Classification of compressed hyperspectral images was studied in . Recently, @cite_1 proposed an algorithm based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to compress the images before feeding them to a neural net for reportedly a 2 to 10 @math speed up of the training with minor image classification accuracy loss. @cite_7 provide a critical review on document image analysis techniques directly in the compressed domain. To our knowledge, inference from compressed representations produced by image compression algorithms has not been considered before.