nCTX: A Neural Network-Powered Lossless Compressive Transmission Using Shared Information

In this work, we explore the possibility of a new delivery method for lossless data, namely compressive transmission. It aims at minimizing the transmission data volume at runtime by exploiting the tailored information shared between the sender and the receiver. There are two approaches to leverage shared information for compression: 1) using a DNN-based codec as a proxy for shared information and 2) applying redundancy elimination using deduplication. However, these approaches have not been studied in depth to utilize the trade-off between the compression rate and the amount of shared information. Compared to these approaches, compressive transmission is unique as it fully leverages the abundance of information available on both sides, which is chosen and placed purposely. To bring the concept to reality, we propose nCTX, a neural network-powered Compressive Transmission System that adaptively exploits a generative model and matching blocks. nCTX extracts the optimal semantic data from the input data, exploiting shared information to closely imitate the original and compensate it with the offset (i.e., difference). Extensive evaluations in mobile platforms confirm that nCTX reduces the transmission volume significantly by 25.8% and 23.3% compared to FLIF and RC, the state-of-the-art image codecs, respectively, in comparable or shorter computation times.