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Draft:High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression

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High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression (HiFiC)[1] is an advanced method in image compression that leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to achieve superior visual quality at reduced bitrates. Introduced by Fabian Mentzer and colleagues in 2020, HiFiC combines learned compression techniques with GANs to produce reconstructions that are perceptually similar to the original images, even at low bitrates.

Overview

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Traditional image compression methods often face a trade-off between compression ratio and image quality. HiFiC addresses this challenge by integrating GANs into the compression process. The system comprises three main components:

  • Autoencoder Architecture: This component defines a nonlinear transform to a latent space, effectively capturing the essential features of the image.
  • Generative Adversarial Network: The GAN is employed to enhance the perceptual quality of the reconstructed images, ensuring they are visually appealing and closely resemble the originals.
  • Perceptual Loss Functions: These functions guide the training process to prioritize perceptual similarity over pixel-wise accuracy, aligning the reconstructions with human visual perception.

By operating across a broad range of bitrates, HiFiC can be applied to high-resolution images, making it versatile for various applications.

Performance and Evaluation

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HiFiC has been evaluated using various perceptual metrics and through user studies[2]. Results indicate that HiFiC outperforms previous approaches, even when those methods utilize more than twice the bitrate. Users have shown a preference for HiFiC's reconstructions due to their high visual fidelity.

Implementation and Applications

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An open-source implementation of HiFiC is available, enabling researchers and developers to experiment with and build upon the model.

The approach has influenced subsequent research in image compression, inspiring methods that further enhance transform coding and generative post-processing.

References

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  1. ^ High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression, authored by Fabian Mentzer and G. Toderici and M. Tschannen and E. Agustsson, was published in 2020. The work is part of the Neural Information Processing Systems book. featured in the ArXiv journal. falls under volume abs/2006.09965.
  2. ^ High-Fidelity Image Compression with Score-based Generative Models, authored by Emiel Hoogeboom and E. Agustsson and Fabian Mentzer and Luca Versari and G. Toderici and Lucas Theis, was published in 2023. The work is part of the arXiv.org book. featured in the ArXiv journal. falls under volume abs/2305.18231.