Perceptual Image Compression With Conditional Diffusion Transformers

Rui Mao, Xinmin Feng, Changsheng Gao, Li Li, Dong Liu, Xiaoyan Sun

Abstract: Generative models have significantly advanced generative AI, particularly in image and video generation. Recognizing their potential, researchers have begun exploring their application in image compression. However, existing methods face two primary challenges: limited performance improvement and high model complexity. In this paper, to address these two challenges, we propose a perceptual image compression solution by introducing a conditional diffusion model. Given that compression performance heavily depends on the decoder’s generative capability, we base our decoder on the diffusion transformer architecture. To address the model complexity problem, we implement the diffusion transformer architecture with Swin transformer. Equipped with enhanced generative capability, we further augment the decoder with informative features using a multi-scale feature fusion module. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing perceptual image compression methods while achieving lower model complexity.