Explicit Residual-Based Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines

Abstract: Scalable image compression is a technique that progressively reconstructs multiple versions of an image for different requirements. In recent years, images have increasingly been consumed not only by humans but also by image recognition models. This shift has drawn growing attention to scalable image compression methods that serve both machine and human vision (ICMH). Many existing models employ neural network-based codecs, known as learned image compression, and have made significant strides in this field by carefully designing the loss functions. In some cases, however, models are overly reliant on their learning capacity, and their architectural design is not sufficiently considered. In this paper, we enhance the coding efficiency and interpretability of ICMH framework by integrating an explicit residual compression mechanism, which is commonly employed in resolution scalable coding methods such as JPEG2000. Specifically, we propose two complementary methods: Feature Residual-based Scalable Coding (FR-ICMH) and Pixel Residual-based Scalable Coding (PR-ICMH). These proposed methods are applicable to various machine vision tasks. Moreover, they provide flexibility to choose between encoder complexity and compression performance, making it adaptable to diverse application requirements. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, with PR-ICMH achieving up to 29.57% BD-rate savings over the previous work.