Exploiting Spatial and Descriptive Information for Generative Compression

Eri Hosonuma, Taku Yamazaki, Takumi Miyoshi, Akihito Taya, Yuuki Nishiyama, Kaoru Sezaki

Abstract: There will be an increase in situations where images taken in specific locations are transmitted through networks for various services. However, this trend can lead to significant communication loads due to simultaneous transmission of images from multiple locations. Therefore, it is important to reduce the amount of network traffic in image transmission. While traditional compression methods focus on minimizing information loss in images, some applications only require the retention of semantic information, suggesting potential improvements in communication efficiency. This paper proposes an image generation-based transmission method for highly-efficient communications exploiting composition and descriptive information. The proposed method extracts specific information from an image to decrease the amount of data transmission, and reconstructs the image using an image-generative model by a receiver. In addition, image compression and reconstruction in the proposed method are demonstrated through an experiment. The experimental results indicate a need for a method to evaluate the output and a method for image reconstruction based on this evaluation.