Lossless Image Compression by Joint Prediction of Pixel and Context Using Duplex Neural Networks

This paper presents a new lossless image compression method based on the learning of pixel values and contexts through multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). The prediction errors and contexts obtained by MLPs are forwarded to adaptive arithmetic encoders, like the conventional lossless compression schemes. The MLP-based prediction has long been attempted for lossless compression, and recently convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are also adopted for the lossy/lossless coding. While the existing MLP-based lossless compression schemes focused only on accurate pixel prediction, we jointly predict the pixel values and contexts. We also adopt and design channel-wise progressive learning, residual learning, and duplex network in this MLP-based framework, which leads to improved coding gain compared to the conventional methods. Experiments show that the proposed method performs better than the conventional non-learning algorithms and also recent learning-based compression methods with practical computation time.