# Bridging the gap between image coding for machines and humans

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10732 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10732/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Making Convolutional Networks Shift-Invariant Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11486/) (2019)
- [DeblurGAN-v2: Deblurring (Orders-of-Magnitude) Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03826/) (2019)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Video Coding for Machines: A Paradigm of Collaborative Compression and Intelligent Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03569/) (2020)
- [Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08373/) (2021)
- [Image coding for machines: an end-to-end learned approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09993/) (2021)
- [Learned Image Coding for Machines: A Content-Adaptive Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09992/) (2021)
- [Video Coding for Machine: Compact Visual Representation Compression for Intelligent Collaborative Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09241/) (2021)
- [Analysis of Neural Image Compression Networks for Machine-to-Machine Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06511/) (2022)

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

- [Delta-ICM: Entropy Modeling with Delta Function for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07669/) (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)

Image coding for machines (ICM) aims at reducing the bitrate required to represent an image while minimizing the drop in machine vision analysis accuracy. In many use cases, such as surveillance, it is also important that the visual quality is not drastically deteriorated by the compression process. Recent works on using neural network (NN) based ICM codecs have shown significant coding gains against traditional methods; however, the decompressed images, especially at low bitrates, often contain checkerboard artifacts. We propose an effective decoder finetuning scheme based on adversarial training to significantly enhance the visual quality of ICM codecs, while preserving the machine analysis accuracy, without adding extra bitcost or parameters at the inference phase. The results show complete removal of the checkerboard artifacts at the negligible cost of -1.6% relative change in task performance score. In the cases where some amount of artifacts is tolerable, such as when machine consumption is the primary target, this technique can enhance both pixel-fidelity and feature-fidelity scores without losing task performance.