Hierarchical Semantic Compression for Consistent Image Semantic Restoration

The emerging semantic compression has been receiving increasing research efforts most recently, capable of achieving high fidelity restoration during compression, even at extremely low bitrates. However, existing semantic compression methods typically combine standard pipelines with either pre-defin...

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Publié dans:IEEE transactions on image processing : a publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. - 1992. - PP(2025) vom: 13. Okt.
Auteur principal: Li, Shengxi (Auteur)
Autres auteurs: Zhang, Zifu, Xu, Mai, Jiang, Lai, Liu, Yufan, Zhu, Ce
Format: Article en ligne
Langue:English
Publié: 2025
Accès à la collection:IEEE transactions on image processing : a publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
Sujets:Journal Article
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Résumé:The emerging semantic compression has been receiving increasing research efforts most recently, capable of achieving high fidelity restoration during compression, even at extremely low bitrates. However, existing semantic compression methods typically combine standard pipelines with either pre-defined or high-dimensional semantics, thus suffering from deficiency in compression. To address this issue, we propose a novel hierarchical semantic compression (HSC) framework that purely operates within intrinsic semantic spaces from generative models, which is able to achieve efficient compression for consistent semantic restoration. More specifically, we first analyse the entropy models for the semantic compression, which motivates us to employ a hierarchical architecture based on a newly developed general inversion encoder. Then, we propose the feature compression network (FCN) and semantic compression network (SCN), such that the middle-level semantic feature and core semantics are hierarchically compressed to restore both accuracy and consistency of image semantics, via an entropy model progressively shared by channel-wise context. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed HSC framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on subjective quality and consistency for human vision, together with superior performances on machine vision tasks given compressed bitstreams. This essentially coincides with human visual system in understanding images, thus providing a new framework for future image/video compression paradigms. Our code shall be released upon acceptance
Description:Date Revised 13.10.2025
published: Print-Electronic
Citation Status Publisher
ISSN:1941-0042
DOI:10.1109/TIP.2025.3618379