Semantic Structured Image Coding Framework for Multiple Intelligent Applications

Fast-growing intelligent media processing applications demand efficient processing throughout the processing chain from the edge to the cloud, and the complexity bottleneck usually lies in the parallel decoding of multiple-channel compressed bitstreams before analyzing. This occurs because the traditional media coding scheme generates a binary stream without a semantic structure, which is unable to be operated directly at the bitstream level to support different tasks such as classification, recognition, detection, etc. Therefore, in this article, we propose a learning-based semantically structured image coding (SSIC) framework to generate a semantically structured bitstream (SSB), where each part of the bitstream represents a specific object and can be directly used for the aforementioned intelligent tasks. Specifically, we integrate an object location extraction module into the compression framework to locate and align objects in the feature domain. Then, each object together with the background is compressed separately and reorganized to form a structured bitstream to enable the analysis or reconstruction of specific objects directly from partial bitstream. Furthermore, in contrast to existing learning-based compression schemes that train the specific model for a specific bitrate, we share most of the model parameters among various bitrates to significantly reduce the model size for variable-rate compression. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coding scheme whose compression performance is comparable to existing image coding schemes, where intelligent tasks such as classification and pose estimation can be directly performed on a partial bitstream without performance degradation, significantly reducing the complexity for analyzing tasks.