Multiscale Progressive Image Compression Network Guided by Learnable Just Noticeable Distortion

One key challenge to the learning-based image compression is that adaptive bit allocation is crucial for compression effectiveness but can hardly be trained into a neural network. Hereby, in this work, We presents an end-to-end trainable image compression framework, named Multi-scale Progressive Network (MPN) to achieve spatially variant bit allocation and rate control through the guidance of a novel learnable just noticeable distortion (JND) map. Specifically, MPN's encoder archives multi-scale feature representation through a three-branched structure. Each branch employs an independent feature extraction strategy for the specific receptive field and merge progressively under the guidance of corresponding learnable JND maps that generated by our proposed Bit-Allocation sub-Network (BAN), which make MPN focus on the areas where attract the human visual system (HVS) and preserve more texture of the image during the compression procedure. Finally, a hybrid objective function is introduced to further make MPN more efficient and mimic the discriminative characteristics of the human visual system (HVS). Experiments show that MPN significantly outperforms traditional JPEG, JPEG 2000 and few state-of-art learning-based methods by multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) index, and has the ability to produce the much better visual result with rich textures, sharp edges, and fewer artifacts.