Causal Contextual Prediction for Learned Image Compression

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 32; no. 4; pp. 2329 - 2341
• Main Authors: Guo, Zongyu, Zhang, Zhizheng, Feng, Runsen, Chen, Zhibo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: causal context model; causal global prediction; Codec; Context; Context modeling; Correlation; Decoding; Distortion; Entropy; Entropy coding; Image coding; Image compression; improved entropy model; Learned image compression; Optimization; Prediction models; Predictive models; Spatial dependencies; Transforms
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2021.3089491

Over the past several years, we have witnessed impressive progress in the field of learned image compression. Recent learned image codecs are commonly based on autoencoders, that first encode an image into low-dimensional latent representations and then decode them for reconstruction purposes. To capture spatial dependencies in the latent space, prior works exploit hyperprior and spatial context model to build an entropy model, which estimates the bit-rate for end-to-end rate-distortion optimization. However, such an entropy model is suboptimal from two aspects: (1) It fails to capture global-scope spatial correlations among the latents. (2) Cross-channel relationships of the latents remain unexplored. In this paper, we propose the concept of separate entropy coding to leverage a serial decoding process for causal contextual entropy prediction in the latent space. A causal context model is proposed that separates the latents across channels and makes use of channel-wise relationships to generate highly informative adjacent contexts. Furthermore, we propose a causal global prediction model to find global reference points for accurate predictions of undecoded points. Both these two models facilitate entropy estimation without the transmission of overhead. In addition, we further adopt a new group-separated attention module to build more powerful transform networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our full image compression model outperforms standard VVC/H.266 codec on Kodak dataset in terms of both PSNR and MS-SSIM, yielding the state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance.