Security and Real-time FPGA integration for Learned Image Compression

Abstract: Learnable Image Compression (LIC) has proven capable of outperforming standardized video codecs in compression efficiency. However, achieving both real-time and secure LIC operations on hardware presents significant conceptual and methodological challenges. The present work addresses these challenges by providing an integrated workflow and platform for training, securing, and deploying LIC models on hardware. To this end, a hardware-friendly LIC model is obtained by iteratively pruning and quantizing the model within a standard end-to-end learning framework. Notably, we introduce a novel Quantization-Aware Watermarking (QAW) technique, where the model is watermarked during quantization using a joint loss function, ensuring robust security without compromising model performance. The watermarked weights are then public-key encrypted, guaranteeing both content protection and user traceability. Experimental results across different FPGA platforms evaluate real-time performance, latency, energy consumption, and compression efficiency. The findings highlight that the watermarking and encryption processes maintain negligible impact on compression efficiency (average of -0.4 PSNR) and energy consumption (average of +2%), while still meeting real-time constraints and preserving security properties.