通过重新训练量化后特征,提升图像压缩模型性能。
Optimizing Learned Image Compression on Scalar and Entropy-Constraint Quantization
- 训练后用推理时的真实量化数据微调网络。
- 在Kodak和TecNick上分别获得1%~2%和最高2.2%的码率增益。
- 适合关注压缩效率、尤其是熵约束量化场景的研究者。
变分自编码器在图像压缩方面的持续进步,使学习型编码器在率失真效率上达到与传统方法相当的水平。然而,训练过程中难以正确处理量化,因其几乎处处导数为零,需用可微近似替代,但现有方法无法准确建模量化噪声,导致网络性能次优。为此,我们提出一种额外微调步骤:在常规端到端训练后,使用推理阶段获取的量化特征重新训练网络部分结构。对于像基于网格搜索的熵约束量化(如Trellis-Coded Quantization),其量化结果依赖熵模型与失真度量的联合优化,难以通过简单取整或加噪来近似。实验表明,该方法在保持推理复杂度不变的前提下,对均匀标量量化和熵约束量化均带来显著编码增益。在Kodak测试集上平均节省1%~2%比特率,在TecNick测试集上最高达2.2%(以Bjøntegaard-Delta衡量)。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The continuous improvements on image compression with variational autoencoders have lead to learned codecs competitive with conventional approaches in terms of rate-distortion efficiency. Nonetheless, taking the quantization into account during the training process remains a problem, since it produces zero derivatives almost everywhere and needs to be replaced with a differentiable approximation which allows end-to-end optimization. Though there are different methods for approximating the quantization, none of them model the quantization noise correctly and thus, result in suboptimal networks. Hence, we propose an additional finetuning training step: After conventional end-to-end training, parts of the network are retrained on quantized latents obtained at the inference stage. For entropy-constraint quantizers like Trellis-Coded Quantization, the impact of the quantizer is particularly difficult to approximate by rounding or adding noise as the quantized latents are interdependently chosen through a trellis search based on both the entropy model and a distortion measure. We show that retraining on correctly quantized data consistently yields additional coding gain for both uniform scalar and especially for entropy-constraint quantization, without increasing inference complexity. For the Kodak test set, we obtain average savings between 1% and 2%, and for the TecNick test set up to 2.2% in terms of Bjøntegaard-Delta bitrate.
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