The paper introduces RAE-CoD, a diffusion-based compression method that operates in a representation autoencoder space to preserve recognizable content even at extremely low bitrates. It addresses the problem of semantic collapse observed in existing codecs when the bitrate approaches zero, showing that reconstruction losses conflict with semantic objectives and that VAE diffusion models lose efficiency in preserving semantics. Experiments on MSCOCO-30K demonstrate that RAE-CoD outperforms competitors, reducing VFM feature MSE and Fréchet Distance ratios by at least 25.7% and 69.1% at 0.001–0.008 bpp while maintaining stable recognizability and quality.
By Tianyu Zhang, Zhaoyang Jia, Houqiang Li, Dong Liu
arXiv:2608. 10544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image restoration is fundamentally constrained by the tradeoff between distortion and perception: minimizing pixel-wise error yields over-smoothed results, whereas optimizing for perceptual realism often introduces structural deviations.
By Sangwoo Jo, Donggeun Ko, Jayeon Kang, Youngsang Kwak, Jaehwa Kwak, Sungjoon Choi
Unified image restoration (UIR) aims to recover high-quality (HQ) content from low-quality (LQ) images with different degradations using a single model. Most recent methods adapt large pretrained text-to-image (T2I) latent diffusion models for their strong capacity and generative priors.
arXiv:2608. 09133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image super-resolution (SR) with large generative models has recently achieved remarkable perceptual quality, yet maintaining fidelity to the LR observation remains challenging.
By Yu Shi, Yuyao Zhang, Yu-wing Tai
arXiv:2606.21030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Diffusion-based image compression has achieved strong perceptual quality at ultra-low bitrates. However, existing codecs are often tied to sp...
By Yinhuan Huang, Hao Cao, Pu chen, Wenqi Guo, Jungong Han, Zhijin Qin
Most existing extreme compression methods fail to achieve an optimal rate-distortion-perception trade-off, as they typically prioritize perceptual fidelity and visual realism over pixel-level accuracy. Consequently, the resulting reconstructions often deviate noticeably from the originals.