Natural image compression has been greatly improved in the deep learning era. However, the compression performance will be heavily degraded if the pretrained encoder is directly applied on screen content image compression. Meanwhile, we observe that parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods have shown great adaptation ability in high-level vision tasks. Therefore, we propose a Dec-Adapter, a pioneering entropy-efficient transfer learning module for the decoder to bridge natural image and screen content compression. The adapter’s parameters are learned during encoding and transmitted to the decoder for image-adaptive decoding. Our Dec-Adapter is lightweight, domain-transferable, and architecture-agnostic with generalized performance in bridging the two domains. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms all existing methods by a large margin in terms of BD-rate performance on screen content image compression. Specifically, our method achieves over 2 dB gain compared with the baseline when transferred to screen content image compression.

Nowadays, there is an explosive growth of screen contents due to the wide application of screen sharing, remote cooperation, and online education. To match the limited terminal bandwidth, high-resolution (HR) screen contents may be downsampled and compressed. At the receiver side, the super-resolution (SR)of low-resolution (LR) screen content images (SCIs) is highly demanded by the HR display or by the users to zoom in for detail observation. However, image SR methods mostly designed for natural images do not generalize well for SCIs due to the very different image characteristics as well as the requirement of SCI browsing at arbitrary scales. To this end, we propose a novel Implicit Transformer Super-Resolution Network (ITSRN) for SCISR. For high-quality continuous SR at arbitrary ratios, pixel values at query coordinates are inferred from image features at key coordinates by the proposed implicit transformer and an implicit position encoding scheme is proposed to aggregate similar neighboring pixel values to the query one. We construct benchmark SCI1K and SCI1K-compression datasets withLR and HR SCI pairs. Extensive experiments show that the proposed ITSRN significantly outperforms several competitive continuous and discrete SR methods for both compressed and uncompressed SCIs.