Recently, learning-based image compression model has attracted much attention due to its impressive performance and ease of optimization, compared with traditional DCT and wavelet-based image compression standards. Most learning-based image compression models are trained to minimize joint rate-distortion (RD) loss on one single RD trade-off point. However, in many multimedia applications, due to communication constraints, or display adaptation needs for different spatial formats, bit rates or power, it is necessary to provide a variety of image versions for different client devices. To fulfill this requirement, typical end-to-end image compression methods have to compress an image into several bit streams independently by a number of pre-trained networks, which are resource-consuming because of redundancy among these streams. To address this problem, inspired by traditional scalable video coding framework, we propose a learning-based end-to-end quality and spatial scalable image compression (QSSIC) model in multi-layer structure, in which each layer could generate one bitstream corresponding to a specified resolution and image fidelity. This scalability is achieved by exploring the potential of feature-domain representation prediction and reuse. To be specific, firstly, bitstreams of previous layers are used to predict the current layer representations which contains the enhancement information, and then only prediction residuals need to be coded in enhancement layers. Secondly, previous bitstreams are reused in image reconstruction in higher layers to provide basic information. The proposed model could be optimized in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-art deep neural networks (DNN)-based auto-encoders in simulcast scenarios. In addition, our method has a better performance than the traditional scalable image compression method scalable extension of H.264/AVC (SVC) and is comparable to scalable extension of H.265/HEVC (SHVC).

Recent advances in sensor technology and wide deployment of visual sensors lead to a new application whereas compression of images are not mainly for pixel recovery for human consumption, instead it is for communication to cloud side machine vision tasks like classification, identification, detection and tracking. This opens up new research dimensions for a learning based compression that directly optimizes loss function in vision tasks, and therefore achieves better compression performance vis-a-vis the pixel recovery and then performing vision tasks computing. In this work, we developed a learning based compression scheme that learns a compact feature representation and appropriate bitstreams for the task of visual object detection. Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) framework is adopted for learning a compact representation, while a bridge network is trained to drive the detection loss function. Simulation results demonstrate that this approach is achieving a new state-of-the-art in task driven compression efficiency, compared with pixel recovery approaches, including both learning based and handcrafted solutions.

The small screen of mobile devices and bandwidth limitations of communication networks greatly affect users' quality of experience (QoE), especially for soccer video, which is characterized by rapid movement and small objects. In this paper, a Compressed-domain Soccer Video Quality assessment Model (CSVQM) is proposed based on the fact that soccer video includes three distinct scene types, which cause different concerns for viewers. To reduce complexity and operate in real-time, all model parameters are derived from the compressed video stream without resorting to complete video decoding. The validation shows that CSVQM significantly outperforms conventional models in terms of accuracy, consistency, and complexity.