arXiv Computer Vision By Tianyu Zhang, Zhaoyang Jia, Houqiang Li, Dong Liu

Rethinking Generative Image Compression at Extremely Low Bitrates

Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computer Vision.