A Deep Wavelet AutoEncoder Scheme for Image Compression

For many years and since its appearance, Digital Wavelet Transform DWT has been used with great success in a wide range of applications especially in image compression and signal de-noising. Combined with several and various approaches, this powerful mathematical tool has shown its strength to compress images with high compression ratio and good visual quality. This paper attempts to demonstrate that it is needless to follow the classical three stages process of compression: pixels transformation, quantization and binary coding when compressing images using the baseline method. Indeed, in this work, we propose a new scheme of image compression system based on an unsupervised convolutional neural network AutoEncoder (CAE) that will reconstruct the approximate sub-band issue from image decomposition by the wavelet transform DWT. In order To evaluate the model’s performance we use Kodak dataset containing a set of 24 images never compressed with a lossy algorithm technique and applied the approach on every one of them. We compared our achieved results with those obtained using standard compression method. We draw this comparison in terms of four performance parameters: Structural Similarity Index Metrix SSIM, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio PSNR, Mean Square Error MSE and Compression Ratio CR. The proposed scheme offers significate improvement in distortion metrics over the traditional image compression method when evaluated for perceptual quality moreover it produces better visual quality images with clearer details and textures which demonstrates its effectiveness and its robustness