Compression Artifacts Reduction by a Deep Convolutional Network

Lossy compression introduces complex compression artifacts, particularly the blocking artifacts, ringing effects and blurring. Existing algorithms either focus on removing blocking artifacts and produce blurred output, or restores sharpened images that are accompanied with ringing effects. Inspired by the deep convolutional networks (DCN) on super-resolution, we formulate a compact and efficient network for seamless attenuation of different compression artifacts. We also demonstrate that a deeper model can be effectively trained with the features learned in a shallow network. Following a similar "easy to hard" idea, we systematically investigate several practical transfer settings and show the effectiveness of transfer learning in low-level vision problems. Our method shows superior performance than the state-of-the-arts both on the benchmark datasets and the real-world use case (i.e. Twitter). In addition, we show that our method can be applied as pre-processing to facilitate other low-level vision routines when they take compressed images as input.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figures, conferenc

DPW-SDNet: Dual Pixel-Wavelet Domain Deep CNNs for Soft Decoding of JPEG-Compressed Images

JPEG is one of the widely used lossy compression methods. JPEG-compressed images usually suffer from compression artifacts including blocking and blurring, especially at low bit-rates. Soft decoding is an effective solution to improve the quality of compressed images without changing codec or introducing extra coding bits. Inspired by the excellent performance of the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on both low-level and high-level computer vision problems, we develop a dual pixel-wavelet domain deep CNNs-based soft decoding network for JPEG-compressed images, namely DPW-SDNet. The pixel domain deep network takes the four downsampled versions of the compressed image to form a 4-channel input and outputs a pixel domain prediction, while the wavelet domain deep network uses the 1-level discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) coefficients to form a 4-channel input to produce a DWT domain prediction. The pixel domain and wavelet domain estimates are combined to generate the final soft decoded result. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DPW-SDNet over several state-of-the-art compression artifacts reduction algorithms.Comment: CVPRW 201

S-Net: A Scalable Convolutional Neural Network for JPEG Compression Artifact Reduction

Recent studies have used deep residual convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for JPEG compression artifact reduction. This study proposes a scalable CNN called S-Net. Our approach effectively adjusts the network scale dynamically in a multitask system for real-time operation with little performance loss. It offers a simple and direct technique to evaluate the performance gains obtained with increasing network depth, and it is helpful for removing redundant network layers to maximize the network efficiency. We implement our architecture using the Keras framework with the TensorFlow backend on an NVIDIA K80 GPU server. We train our models on the DIV2K dataset and evaluate their performance on public benchmark datasets. To validate the generality and universality of the proposed method, we created and utilized a new dataset, called WIN143, for over-processed images evaluation. Experimental results indicate that our proposed approach outperforms other CNN-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.Comment: accepted by Journal of Electronic Imagin

Deep Generative Adversarial Compression Artifact Removal

Compression artifacts arise in images whenever a lossy compression algorithm is applied. These artifacts eliminate details present in the original image, or add noise and small structures; because of these effects they make images less pleasant for the human eye, and may also lead to decreased performance of computer vision algorithms such as object detectors. To eliminate such artifacts, when decompressing an image, it is required to recover the original image from a disturbed version. To this end, we present a feed-forward fully convolutional residual network model trained using a generative adversarial framework. To provide a baseline, we show that our model can be also trained optimizing the Structural Similarity (SSIM), which is a better loss with respect to the simpler Mean Squared Error (MSE). Our GAN is able to produce images with more photorealistic details than MSE or SSIM based networks. Moreover we show that our approach can be used as a pre-processing step for object detection in case images are degraded by compression to a point that state-of-the art detectors fail. In this task, our GAN method obtains better performance than MSE or SSIM trained networks.Comment: ICCV 2017 Camera Ready + Acknowledgement

Learning a Virtual Codec Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network to Compress Image

Although deep convolutional neural network has been proved to efficiently eliminate coding artifacts caused by the coarse quantization of traditional codec, it's difficult to train any neural network in front of the encoder for gradient's back-propagation. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end image compression framework based on convolutional neural network to resolve the problem of non-differentiability of the quantization function in the standard codec. First, the feature description neural network is used to get a valid description in the low-dimension space with respect to the ground-truth image so that the amount of image data is greatly reduced for storage or transmission. After image's valid description, standard image codec such as JPEG is leveraged to further compress image, which leads to image's great distortion and compression artifacts, especially blocking artifacts, detail missing, blurring, and ringing artifacts. Then, we use a post-processing neural network to remove these artifacts. Due to the challenge of directly learning a non-linear function for a standard codec based on convolutional neural network, we propose to learn a virtual codec neural network to approximate the projection from the valid description image to the post-processed compressed image, so that the gradient could be efficiently back-propagated from the post-processing neural network to the feature description neural network during training. Meanwhile, an advanced learning algorithm is proposed to train our deep neural networks for compression. Obviously, the priority of the proposed method is compatible with standard existing codecs and our learning strategy can be easily extended into these codecs based on convolutional neural network. Experimental results have demonstrated the advances of the proposed method as compared to several state-of-the-art approaches, especially at very low bit-rate.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Implicit Dual-domain Convolutional Network for Robust Color Image Compression Artifact Reduction

Several dual-domain convolutional neural network-based methods show outstanding performance in reducing image compression artifacts. However, they suffer from handling color images because the compression processes for gray-scale and color images are completely different. Moreover, these methods train a specific model for each compression quality and require multiple models to achieve different compression qualities. To address these problems, we proposed an implicit dual-domain convolutional network (IDCN) with the pixel position labeling map and the quantization tables as inputs. Specifically, we proposed an extractor-corrector framework-based dual-domain correction unit (DCU) as the basic component to formulate the IDCN. A dense block was introduced to improve the performance of extractor in DRU. The implicit dual-domain translation allows the IDCN to handle color images with the discrete cosine transform (DCT)-domain priors. A flexible version of IDCN (IDCN-f) was developed to handle a wide range of compression qualities. Experiments for both objective and subjective evaluations on benchmark datasets show that IDCN is superior to the state-of-the-art methods and IDCN-f exhibits excellent abilities to handle a wide range of compression qualities with little performance sacrifice and demonstrates great potential for practical applications.Comment: accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology(T-CSVT

Machine Learning based Post Processing Artifact Reduction in HEVC Intra Coding

The lossy compression techniques produce various artifacts like blurring, distortion at block bounders, ringing and contouring effects on outputs especially at low bit rates. To reduce those compression artifacts various Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based post processing techniques have been experimented over recent years. The latest video coding standard HEVC adopts two post processing filtering operations namely de-blocking filter (DBF) followed by sample adaptive offset (SAO). These operations consumes extra signaling bit and becomes an overhead to network. In this paper we proposed a new Deep learning based algorithm on SAO filtering operation. We designed a variable filter size Sub-layered Deeper CNN (SDCNN) architecture to improve filtering operation and incorporated large stride convolutional, deconvolution layers for further speed up. We also demonstrated that deeper architecture model can effectively be trained with the features learnt in a shallow network using data augmentation and transfer learning based techniques. Experimental results shows that our proposed network outperforms other networks in terms on PSNR and SSIM measurements on widely available benchmark video sequences and also perform an average of 4.1 % bit rate reduction as compared to HEVC baseline

Deep Reference Generation with Multi-Domain Hierarchical Constraints for Inter Prediction

Inter prediction is an important module in video coding for temporal redundancy removal, where similar reference blocks are searched from previously coded frames and employed to predict the block to be coded. Although traditional video codecs can estimate and compensate for block-level motions, their inter prediction performance is still heavily affected by the remaining inconsistent pixel-wise displacement caused by irregular rotation and deformation. In this paper, we address the problem by proposing a deep frame interpolation network to generate additional reference frames in coding scenarios. First, we summarize the previous adaptive convolutions used for frame interpolation and propose a factorized kernel convolutional network to improve the modeling capacity and simultaneously keep its compact form. Second, to better train this network, multi-domain hierarchical constraints are introduced to regularize the training of our factorized kernel convolutional network. For spatial domain, we use a gradually down-sampled and up-sampled auto-encoder to generate the factorized kernels for frame interpolation at different scales. For quality domain, considering the inconsistent quality of the input frames, the factorized kernel convolution is modulated with quality-related features to learn to exploit more information from high quality frames. For frequency domain, a sum of absolute transformed difference loss that performs frequency transformation is utilized to facilitate network optimization from the view of coding performance. With the well-designed frame interpolation network regularized by multi-domain hierarchical constraints, our method surpasses HEVC on average 6.1% BD-rate saving and up to 11.0% BD-rate saving for the luma component under the random access configuration

Spatial-Temporal Residue Network Based In-Loop Filter for Video Coding

Deep learning has demonstrated tremendous break through in the area of image/video processing. In this paper, a spatial-temporal residue network (STResNet) based in-loop filter is proposed to suppress visual artifacts such as blocking, ringing in video coding. Specifically, the spatial and temporal information is jointly exploited by taking both current block and co-located block in reference frame into consideration during the processing of in-loop filter. The architecture of STResNet only consists of four convolution layers which shows hospitality to memory and coding complexity. Moreover, to fully adapt the input content and improve the performance of the proposed in-loop filter, coding tree unit (CTU) level control flag is applied in the sense of rate-distortion optimization. Extensive experimental results show that our scheme provides up to 5.1% bit-rate reduction compared to the state-of-the-art video coding standard.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, accepted by VCIP201

Learned Compression Artifact Removal by Deep Residual Networks

We propose a method for learned compression artifact removal by post-processing of BPG compressed images. We trained three networks of different sizes. We encoded input images using BPG with different QP values. We submitted the best combination of test images, encoded with different QP and post-processed by one of three networks, which satisfy the file size and decode time constraints imposed by the Challenge. The selection of the best combination is posed as an integer programming problem. Although the visual improvements in image quality is impressive, the average PSNR improvement for the results is about 0.5 dB.Comment: Accepted for publication in the CVPR 2018, Challenge on Learned Image Compression (CLIC), Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, 18 June 2018 and appears in compression.c