Self-Supervised Variable Rate Image Compression using Visual Attention

Abhishek Kumar Sinha, S. Manthira Moorthi, Debajyoti Dhar

Abstract: The recent success of self-supervised learning relies on its ability to learn the representations from self-defined pseudo-labels that are applied to several downstream tasks. Motivated by this ability, we present a deep image compression technique, which learns the lossy reconstruction of raw images from the self-supervised learned representation of SimCLR ResNet-50 architecture. Our framework uses a feature pyramid to achieve the variable rate compression of the image using a self-attention map for the optimal allocation of bits. The paper provides an overview to observe the effects of contrastive self-supervised representations and the self-attention map on the distortion and perceptual quality of the reconstructed image. The experiments are performed on a different class of images to show that the proposed method outperforms the other variable rate deep compression models without compromising the perceptual quality of the images.