# A Study on the Effect of Color Spaces in Learned Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13709 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13709/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02736/) (2018)
- [Learned Image Compression with Discretized Gaussian Mixture Likelihoods and Attention Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01568/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ColorNet: Investigating the importance of color spaces for image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00267/) (2019)
- [Learning-Based Conditional Image Coder Using Color Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06241/) (2022)
- [Color Learning for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17460/) (2023)
- [A novel Cross-Component Context Model for End-to-End Wavelet Image Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05121/) (2023)
- [SLIC: A Learned Image Codec Using Structure and Color](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17246/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we present a comparison between color spaces namely YUV, LAB, RGB and their effect on learned image compression. For this we use the structure and color based learned image codec (SLIC) from our prior work, which consists of two branches - one for the luminance component (Y or L) and another for chrominance components (UV or AB). However, for the RGB variant we input all 3 channels in a single branch, similar to most learned image codecs operating in RGB. The models are trained for multiple bitrate configurations in each color space. We report the findings from our experiments by evaluating them on various datasets and compare the results to state-of-the-art image codecs. The YUV model performs better than the LAB variant in terms of MS-SSIM with a Bjontegaard delta bitrate (BD-BR) gain of 7.5% using VTM intra-coding mode as the baseline. Whereas the LAB variant has a better performance than YUV model in terms of CIEDE2000 having a BD-BR gain of 8%. Overall, the RGB variant of SLIC achieves the best performance with a BD-BR gain of 13.14% in terms of MS-SSIM and a gain of 17.96% in CIEDE2000 at the cost of a higher model complexity.