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.

We propose a method for lossy image compression based on recurrent, convolutional neural networks that outperforms BPG (4:2:0), WebP, JPEG2000, and JPEG as measured by MS-SSIM. We introduce three improvements over previous research that lead to this state-of-the-art result. First, we show that training with a pixel-wise loss weighted by SSIM increases reconstruction quality according to several metrics. Second, we modify the recurrent architecture to improve spatial diffusion, which allows the network to more effectively capture and propagate image information through the network's hidden state. Finally, in addition to lossless entropy coding, we use a spatially adaptive bit allocation algorithm to more efficiently use the limited number of bits to encode visually complex image regions. We evaluate our method on the Kodak and Tecnick image sets and compare against standard codecs as well recently published methods based on deep neural networks.

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The leading approach for image compression with artificial neural networks (ANNs) is to learn a nonlinear transform and a fixed entropy model that are optimized for rate-distortion performance. We show that this approach can be significantly improved by incorporating spatially local, image-dependent entropy models. The key insight is that existing ANN-based methods learn an entropy model that is shared between the encoder and decoder, but they do not transmit any side information that would allow the model to adapt to the structure of a specific image. We present a method for augmenting ANN-based image coders with image-dependent side information that leads to a 17.8% rate reduction over a state-of-theart ANN-based baseline model on a standard evaluation set, and 70-98% reductions on images with low visual complexity that are poorly captured by a fixed, global entropy model.

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