Image Coding for Machines based on Non-Uniform Importance Allocation

Yunpeng Qi, Ruoyu Feng, Zhizheng Zhang, Zhibo Chen

Abstract: In the Internet era, the explosive growth of media data processing poses significant challenges for the research of Image Coding for Machines (ICM) in improving the efficiency of AI models while reducing the burdens of data storage and transmission. Existing ICM methods face challenges in achieving sufficient generalization ability when developing a single codec to handle diverse downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose a unified ICM framework that facilitates diverse downstream tasks with a novel importance allocation mechanism. Equipped with a spatially variable-rate image compression codec, we introduce two options: online updating and offline predicting the non-uniform quality map, which governs the quality distribution of reconstructed images based on specific downstream tasks. Our proposed method is rigorously evaluated through extensive experiments on diverse and comprehensive fine-grained image classification datasets. The experiment results conclusively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving a superior rate-distortion trade-off for ICM.