Multiple Description Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Compression

Multiple description coding (MDC) is able to stably transmit signal in un-reliable and non-prioritized networks, which has been broadly studied for several decades. However, traditional MDC does not well leverage image's context features to generate multiple descriptions. In this paper, we propose a novel standard-compliant convolutional neural network-based MDC framework, which efficiently leverages image's context information to compress the image. First, multiple description generator network (MDGN) is designed to produce appearance-similar yet feature-different multiple descriptions automatically according to image's content, which are compressed by a standard codec. Second, we present multiple description reconstruction network (MDRN) including side reconstruction networks (SRNs) and central reconstruction network (CRN). When any one of two lossy descriptions is received at decoder, SRN network is used to improve the quality of this decoded lossy description by simultaneously removing compression artifact and up-sampling. Meanwhile, we utilize CRN network with two decoded descriptions as inputs for better reconstruction, if both of lossy descriptions are available. Third, multiple description virtual codec network is proposed to bridge the gap between MDGN network and MDRN network in order to train an end-to-end MDC framework. Here, two learning algorithms are provided to train our whole framework. In addition to structural dis-similarity loss function, the produced descriptions are used as opposing labels with multiple description distance loss function to regularize the training of MDGN network. These losses guarantee that the generated descriptions are structurally similar yet finely diverse. Experimental results show a great deal of objective and subjective quality measurements to validate the effectiveness of our framework.