Yimin Zhou

Shiyu Qin, Yimin Zhou, Jinpeng Wang et al.

In this paper, we propose a progressive learning paradigm for transformer-based variable-rate image compression. Our approach covers a wide range of compression rates with the assistance of the Layer-adaptive Prompt Module (LPM). Inspired by visual prompt tuning, we use LPM to extract prompts for input images and hidden features at the encoder side and decoder side, respectively, which are fed as additional information into the Swin Transformer layer of a pre-trained transformer-based image compression model to affect the allocation of attention region and the bits, which in turn changes the target compression ratio of the model. To ensure the network is more lightweight, we involves the integration of prompt networks with less convolutional layers. Exhaustive experiments show that compared to methods based on multiple models, which are optimized separately for different target rates, the proposed method arrives at the same performance with 80% savings in parameter storage and 90% savings in datasets. Meanwhile, our model outperforms all current variable bitrate image methods in terms of rate-distortion performance and approaches the state-of-the-art fixed bitrate image compression methods trained from scratch.

Shiyu Qin, Jinpeng Wang, Yimin Zhou et al.

Learned visual compression is an important and active task in multimedia. Existing approaches have explored various CNN- and Transformer-based designs to model content distribution and eliminate redundancy, where balancing efficacy (i.e., rate-distortion trade-off) and efficiency remains a challenge. Recently, state-space models (SSMs) have shown promise due to their long-range modeling capacity and efficiency. Inspired by this, we take the first step to explore SSMs for visual compression. We introduce MambaVC, a simple, strong and efficient compression network based on SSM. MambaVC develops a visual state space (VSS) block with a 2D selective scanning (2DSS) module as the nonlinear activation function after each downsampling, which helps to capture informative global contexts and enhances compression. On compression benchmark datasets, MambaVC achieves superior rate-distortion performance with lower computational and memory overheads. Specifically, it outperforms CNN and Transformer variants by 9.3% and 15.6% on Kodak, respectively, while reducing computation by 42% and 24%, and saving 12% and 71% of memory. MambaVC shows even greater improvements with high-resolution images, highlighting its potential and scalability in real-world applications. We also provide a comprehensive comparison of different network designs, underscoring MambaVC's advantages. Code is available at https://github.com/QinSY123/2024-MambaVC.