# VVC+M: Plug and Play Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10453 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10453/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02736/) (2018)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (2017)
- [Learned Image Compression with Discretized Gaussian Mixture Likelihoods and Attention Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01568/) (2020)
- [DVC: An End-to-end Deep Video Compression Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00101/) (2018)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [CompressAI: a PyTorch library and evaluation platform for end-to-end compression research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03029/) (2020)
- [Density Modeling of Images using a Generalized Normalization Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06281/) (2015)
- [Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08373/) (2021)
- [CANF-VC: Conditional Augmented Normalizing Flows for Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05315/) (2022)
- [DSSLIC: Deep Semantic Segmentation-based Layered Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03348/) (2018)
- [Scalable Video Coding for Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02512/) (2022)
- [Rate-Distortion in Image Coding for Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11694/) (2022)
- [Learned Disentangled Latent Representations for Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04183/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines Using Feature Fusion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09152/) (2024)
- [Explicit Residual-Based Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19297/) (2025)
- [Guided Diffusion for the Extension of Machine Vision to Human Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17907/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compression for machines is an emerging field, where inputs are encoded while optimizing the performance of downstream automated analysis. In scalable coding for humans and machines, the compressed representation used for machines is further utilized to enable input reconstruction. Often performed by jointly optimizing the compression scheme for both machine task and human perception, this results in sub-optimal rate-distortion (RD) performance for the machine side. We focus on the case of images, proposing to utilize the pre-existing residual coding capabilities of video codecs such as VVC to create a scalable codec from any image compression for machines (ICM) scheme. Using our approach we improve an existing scalable codec to achieve superior RD performance on the machine task, while remaining competitive for human perception. Moreover, our approach can be trained post-hoc for any given ICM scheme, and without creating a coupling between the quality of the machine analysis and human vision.