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Lossy Image Compression with Conditional Diffusion Model
Ruihan Yang · Stephan Mandt

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in Neural Compression: From Information Theory to Applications »
Event URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=GDIp6mRu5m »
This paper outlines an end-to-end optimized lossy image compression framework using diffusion generative models. The approach relies on the transform coding paradigm, where an image is mapped into a latent space for entropy coding and, from there, mapped back to the data space for reconstruction. In contrast to VAE-based neural compression, where the (mean) decoder is a deterministic neural network, our decoder is a conditional diffusion model. Our approach thus introduces an additional "content" latent variable on which the reverse diffusion process is conditioned and uses this variable to store information about the image. The remaining "texture" variables characterizing the diffusion process are synthesized at decoding time. We show that the model's performance can be tuned toward perceptual metrics of interest. Our extensive experiments involving multiple datasets and image quality assessment metrics show that our approach yields stronger reported FID scores than the GAN-based model, while also yielding competitive performance with VAE-based models in several distortion metrics. Furthermore, training the diffusion with $\mathcal{X}$-parameterization enables high-quality reconstructions in only a handful of decoding steps, greatly affecting the model's practicality.

Author Information

Ruihan Yang (UCI)
Stephan Mandt (University of California, Irivine)

Stephan Mandt is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. From 2016 until 2018, he was a Senior Researcher and head of the statistical machine learning group at Disney Research, first in Pittsburgh and later in Los Angeles. He held previous postdoctoral positions at Columbia University and at Princeton University. Stephan holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Cologne. He is a Fellow of the German National Merit Foundation, a Kavli Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and was a visiting researcher at Google Brain. Stephan serves regularly as an Area Chair for NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, and ICLR, and is a member of the Editorial Board of JMLR. His research is currently supported by NSF, DARPA, IBM, and Qualcomm.

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