Learning-based Compression for Material and Texture Recognition

Learning-based image compression was shown to achieve a competitive performance with state-of-the-art transform-based codecs. This motivated the development of new learning-based visual compression standards such as JPEG-AI. Of particular interest to these emerging standards is the development of learning-based image compression systems targeting both humans and machines. This paper is concerned with learning-based compression schemes whose compressed-domain representations can be utilized to perform visual processing and computer vision tasks directly in the compressed domain. Such a characteristic has been incorporated as part of the scope and requirements of the new emerging JPEG-AI standard. In our work, we adopt the learning-based JPEG-AI framework for performing material and texture recognition using the compressed-domain latent representation at varing bit-rates. For comparison, performance results are presented using compressed but fully decoded images in the pixel domain as well as original uncompressed images. The obtained performance results show that even though decoded images can degrade the classification performance of the model trained with original images, retraining the model with decoded images will largely reduce the performance gap for the adopted texture dataset. It is also shown that the compressed-domain classification can yield a competitive performance in terms of Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy while using a smaller reduced-complexity classification model.