A Coupled Compression Generation Network for Remote-Sensing Images at Extremely Low Bitrates

Benefiting from the excellent texture recovery capability of generative adversarial networks (GANs), generated images are capable of maintaining clear texture features even when compressed into extremely low-bit streams. In recent years, the GAN has made great progress in extremely low-bit compression for natural images. However, a few studies have been conducted on extremely low-bit compression for the remote-sensing (RS) field. We find that a single GAN tends to generate visually pleasing texture information, and this characteristic may affect the visual effect and accuracy of other computer vision tasks. Therefore, we propose a coupled compression generation network (CCGN) that reconstructs the image content and detailed textures separately and fuses them to achieve a balanced image reconstruction task at extremely low bitrates for remote-sensing images. Specifically, a multidimensional residual attention mechanism (MRAM) is adopted to achieve extremely low-bit stream generation, whereas contentwise images and texturewise images are reconstructed using the same generator with different training strategies. We further optimize the texture generation strategy, and an enhanced perceptual-guided refinement stage (EPGRS) and a multiscale fusion discriminator (MSFD) are developed for a more realistic texture. The proposed method achieves outstanding results on compression tasks on the dataset for object detection in aerial images (DOTA), and the fused results of extremely low-bit streams also perform well in object detection tasks, significantly alleviating pressure from bandwidth and storage space.