# Enhancing Quality of Compressed Images by Mitigating Enhancement Bias Towards Compression Domain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17200 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17200/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [Towards Principled Methods for Training Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04862/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03264/) (2017)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00734/) (2018)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [Image De-raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05957/) (2017)
- [The 2018 PIRM Challenge on Perceptual Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07517/) (2018)
- [Compression Artifacts Reduction by a Deep Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06993/) (2015)
- [A U-Net Based Discriminator for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12655/) (2020)
- [Attentions Help CNNs See Better: Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10485/) (2022)
- [MFQE 2.0: A New Approach for Multi-frame Quality Enhancement on Compressed Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09707/) (2019)
- [Multi-Frame Quality Enhancement for Compressed Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04680/) (2018)
- [Perceptual Learned Video Compression with Recurrent Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03082/) (2021)
- [Early Exit or Not: Resource-Efficient Blind Quality Enhancement for Compressed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16581/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Image Quality Assessment: Enhancing Perceptual Exploration and Interpretation with Collaborative Feature Refinement and Hausdorff distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15847/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing quality enhancement methods for compressed images focus on aligning the enhancement domain with the raw domain to yield realistic images. However, these methods exhibit a pervasive enhancement bias towards the compression domain, inadvertently regarding it as more realistic than the raw domain. This bias makes enhanced images closely resemble their compressed counterparts, thus degrading their perceptual quality. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to mitigate this bias and enhance the quality of compressed images. Our method employs a conditional discriminator with the compressed image as a key condition, and then incorporates a domain-divergence regularization to actively distance the enhancement domain from the compression domain. Through this dual strategy, our method enables the discrimination against the compression domain, and brings the enhancement domain closer to the raw domain. Comprehensive quality evaluations confirm the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art methods without incurring inference overheads.