DRASIC: Distributed Recurrent Autoencoder for Scalable Image Compression

Enmao Diao, Jie Ding, Vahid Tarokh

Keywords: Image Compression, Distributed Source Coding

TL;DR: We introduce a data-driven Distributed Source Coding framework based on Distributed Recurrent Autoencoder for Scalable Image Compression (DRASIC).

Abstract: We propose a new architecture for distributed image compression from a group of distributed data sources. The work is motivated by practical needs of data-driven codec design, low power consumption, robustness, and data privacy. The proposed architecture, which we refer to as Distributed Recurrent Autoencoder for Scalable Image Compression (DRASIC), is able to train distributed encoders and one joint decoder on correlated data sources. Its compression capability is much better than the method of training codecs separately. Meanwhile, for 10 distributed sources, our distributed system remarkably performs within 2 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of that of a single codec trained with all data sources. We experiment distributed sources with different correlations and show how our methodology well matches the Slepian-Wolf Theorem in Distributed Source Coding (DSC). Our method is also shown to be robust to the lack of presence of encoded data from a number of distributed sources. Moreover, it is scalable in the sense that codes can be decoded simultaneously at more than one compression quality level. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first data-driven DSC framework for general distributed code design with deep learning.