Beyond Coding: Detection-driven Image Compression with Semantically Structured Bit-stream

Abstract

With the development of 5G and edge computing, it is increasingly important to offload intelligent media computing to edge device. Traditional media coding scheme codes the media into one binary stream without a semantic structure, which prevents many important intelligent applications from operating directly in bit-stream level, including semantic analysis, parsing specific content, media editing, etc. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a learning based Semantically Structured Coding (SSC) framework to generate Semantically Structured Bit-stream (SSB), where each part of bit-stream represents a certain object and can be directly used for aforementioned tasks. Specifically, we integrate an object detection module in our compression framework to locate and align the object in feature domain. After applying quantization and entropy coding, the features are re-organized according to detected and aligned objects to form a bit-stream. Besides, different from existing learning-based compression schemes that individually train models for specific bit-rate, we share most of model parameters among various bit-rates to significantly reduce model size for variable-rate compression. Experimental results demonstrate that only at the cost of negligible overhead, objects can be completely reconstructed from partial bit-stream. We also verified that classification and pose estimation can be directly performed on partial bit-stream without performance degradation.