Xiaohan Pan

Guangqi Xie, Xin Li, Xiaohan Pan et al.

Remote medical diagnosis has emerged as a critical and indispensable technique in practical medical systems, where medical data are required to be efficiently compressed and transmitted for diagnosis by either professional doctors or intelligent diagnosis devices. In this process, a large amount of redundant content irrelevant to the diagnosis is subjected to high-fidelity coding, leading to unnecessary transmission costs. To mitigate this, we propose diagnosis-oriented medical image compression, a special semantic compression task designed for medical scenarios, targeting to reduce the compression cost without compromising the diagnosis accuracy. However, collecting sufficient medical data to optimize such a compression system is significantly expensive and challenging due to privacy issues and the lack of professional annotation. In this study, we propose DMIC, the first efficient transfer learning-based codec, for diagnosis-oriented medical image compression, which can be effectively optimized with only few-shot annotated medical examples, by reusing the knowledge in the existing reinforcement learning-based task-driven semantic coding framework, i.e., HRLVSC [1]. Concretely, we focus on tuning only the partial parameters of the policy network for bit allocation within HRLVSC, which enables it to adapt to the medical images. In this work, we validate our DMIC with the typical medical task, Coronary Artery Segmentation. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our DMIC can achieve 47.594%BD-Rate savings compared to the HEVC anchor, by tuning only the A2C module (2.7% parameters) of the policy network with only 1 medical sample.

Yixin Gao, Xin Li, Xiaohan Pan et al.

We present UniMIC, a universal multi-modality image compression framework, intending to unify the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) optimization for multiple image codecs simultaneously through excavating cross-modality generative priors. Unlike most existing works that need to design and optimize image codecs from scratch, our UniMIC introduces the visual codec repository, which incorporates amounts of representative image codecs and directly uses them as the basic codecs for various practical applications. Moreover, we propose multi-grained textual coding, where variable-length content prompt and compression prompt are designed and encoded to assist the perceptual reconstruction through the multi-modality conditional generation. In particular, a universal perception compensator is proposed to improve the perception quality of decoded images from all basic codecs at the decoder side by reusing text-assisted diffusion priors from stable diffusion. With the cooperation of the above three strategies, our UniMIC achieves a significant improvement of RDP optimization for different compression codecs, e.g., traditional and learnable codecs, and different compression costs, e.g., ultra-low bitrates. The code will be available in https://github.com/Amygyx/UniMIC .

Yixin Gao, Xiaohan Pan, Xin Li et al.

The rapid development of AIGC foundation models has revolutionized the paradigm of image compression, which paves the way for the abandonment of most pixel-level transform and coding, compelling us to ask: why compress what you can generate if the AIGC foundation model is powerful enough to faithfully generate intricate structure and fine-grained details from nothing more than some compact descriptors, i.e., texts, or cues. Fortunately, recent GPT-4o image generation of OpenAI has achieved impressive cross-modality generation, editing, and design capabilities, which motivates us to answer the above question by exploring its potential in image compression fields. In this work, we investigate two typical compression paradigms: textual coding and multimodal coding (i.e., text + extremely low-resolution image), where all/most pixel-level information is generated instead of compressing via the advanced GPT-4o image generation function. The essential challenge lies in how to maintain semantic and structure consistency during the decoding process. To overcome this, we propose a structure raster-scan prompt engineering mechanism to transform the image into textual space, which is compressed as the condition of GPT-4o image generation. Extensive experiments have shown that the combination of our designed structural raster-scan prompts and GPT-4o's image generation function achieved the impressive performance compared with recent multimodal/generative image compression at ultra-low bitrate, further indicating the potential of AIGC generation in image compression fields.

Yixin Gao, Xin Li, Xiaohan Pan et al.

We present Comp-X, the first intelligently interactive image compression paradigm empowered by the impressive reasoning capability of large language model (LLM) agent. Notably, commonly used image codecs usually suffer from limited coding modes and rely on manual mode selection by engineers, making them unfriendly for unprofessional users. To overcome this, we advance the evolution of image coding paradigm by introducing three key innovations: (i) multi-functional coding framework, which unifies different coding modes of various objective/requirements, including human-machine perception, variable coding, and spatial bit allocation, into one framework. (ii) interactive coding agent, where we propose an augmented in-context learning method with coding expert feedback to teach the LLM agent how to understand the coding request, mode selection, and the use of the coding tools. (iii) IIC-bench, the first dedicated benchmark comprising diverse user requests and the corresponding annotations from coding experts, which is systematically designed for intelligently interactive image compression evaluation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Comp-X can understand the coding requests efficiently and achieve impressive textual interaction capability. Meanwhile, it can maintain comparable compression performance even with a single coding framework, providing a promising avenue for artificial general intelligence (AGI) in image compression.