Ultra-Efficient Decoding for End-to-End Neural Compression and Reconstruction

Abstract: Image compression and reconstruction are crucial for various digital applications. While contemporary neural compression methods achieve impressive compression rates, the adoption of such technology has been largely hindered by the complexity and large computational costs of the convolution-based decoders during data reconstruction. To address the decoder bottleneck in neural compression, we develop a new compression-reconstruction framework based on incorporating low-rank representation in an autoencoder with vector quantization. We demonstrated that performing a series of computationally efficient low-rank operations on the learned latent representation of images can efficiently reconstruct the data with high quality. Our approach dramatically reduces the computational overhead in the decoding phase of neural compression/reconstruction, essentially eliminating the decoder compute bottleneck while maintaining high fidelity of image outputs.