End-to-End Optimized Image Compression With Deep Gaussian Process Regression

End-to-end optimization via deep neural networks has facilitated lossy image compression. Existing neural network-based entropy models for end-to-end optimized image compression are limited by parameterized Gaussian distributions with deterministic mean and variance and cannot achieve accurate rate estimation for bottleneck representation with varying statistics. In this paper, we propose a novel entropy model based on deep Gaussian process regression (DGPR) to address this problem. Specifically, the proposed entropy model leverages autoregressive DGPR to flexibly predict the channel-wise posterior distributions of high-dimensional bottleneck representation for entropy coding. Consequently, we develop a well-established bit-rate estimation scheme via posterior inference of DGPR using the learned probabilistic distribution. Furthermore, scalable training is achieved via tensor train decomposition and Monte Carlo sampling to enable tractable variational inference of DGPR. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to develop the learnable probabilistic model for flexible parameter estimation in entropy modeling. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms conventional image compression methods (e.g., JPEG2000 and BPG) as well as recent end-to-end optimized methods on the Kodak and Tecnick datasets in terms of rate-distortion performance.