# Enhancing Learned Image Compression via Cross Window-based Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21144 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21144/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Compressive Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00395/) (2017)
- [CompressAI: a PyTorch library and evaluation platform for end-to-end compression research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03029/) (2020)
- [Channel-wise Autoregressive Entropy Models for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08739/) (2020)
- [Residual Non-local Attention Networks for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10082/) (2019)
- [Learned Image Compression with Mixed Transformer-CNN Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14978/) (2023)
- [Full Resolution Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05148/) (2016)
- [Variable Rate Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06085/) (2015)
- [Soft-to-Hard Vector Quantization for End-to-End Learning Compressible Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00648/) (2017)
- [The Devil Is in the Details: Window-based Attention for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08450/) (2022)
- [Context-adaptive Entropy Model for End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10452/) (2018)
- [Conditional Probability Models for Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04260/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Adaptive Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05823/) (2017)
- [Video Frame Interpolation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13817/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Invertible Encoding for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03690/) (2021)
- [Improved Lossy Image Compression with Priming and Spatially Adaptive Bit Rates for Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10114/) (2017)
- [Lossy Compression with Gaussian Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08889/) (2022)
- [End-to-end optimization of nonlinear transform codes for perceptual quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.05006/) (2016)
- [A Unified End-to-End Framework for Efficient Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03370/) (2020)
- [Generative Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01467/) (2017)
- [3-D Context Entropy Model for Improved Practical Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08273/) (2020)

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

- [Variable Rate Image Compression via N-Gram Context based Swin-transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00058/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, learned image compression methods have demonstrated superior rate-distortion performance compared to traditional image compression methods. Recent methods utilize convolutional neural networks (CNN), variational autoencoders (VAE), invertible neural networks (INN), and transformers. Despite their significant contributions, a main drawback of these models is their poor performance in capturing local redundancy. Therefore, to leverage global features along with local redundancy, we propose a CNN-based solution integrated with a feature encoding module. The feature encoding module encodes important features before feeding them to the CNN and then utilizes cross-scale window-based attention, which further captures local redundancy. Cross-scale window-based attention is inspired by the attention mechanism in transformers and effectively enlarges the receptive field. Both the feature encoding module and the cross-scale window-based attention module in our architecture are flexible and can be incorporated into any other network architecture. We evaluate our method on the Kodak and CLIC datasets and demonstrate that our approach is effective and on par with state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/prmudgal/CWAM_IC_ISVC. .