Extreme Image Coding via Multiscale Autoencoders With Generative Adversarial Optimization

We propose a MultiScale AutoEncoder (MSAE) based extreme image coding/compression framework to offer visually pleasing reconstruction at a very low bitrate. Our method leverages the "priors" at different resolution scale to improve the compression efficiency, and also employs the generative adversarial network (GAN) with multiscale discriminators to perform the end-to-end trainable rate-distortion optimization. We compare the perceptual quality of our reconstructions with traditional compression algorithms using High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) based Intra Profile and JPEG2000 on the public Cityscapes, ADE20K and Kodak datasets, demonstrating the significant subjective quality improvement. However, objective measurements, such as PSNR, SSIM, etc, are often deteriorated by applying the generative adversarial optimization.