# GANCompress: GAN-Enhanced Neural Image Compression with Binary Spherical Quantization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13542 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13542/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (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)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Video Compression through Image Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06919/) (2018)
- [Conditional Probability Models for Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04260/) (2018)
- [Frequency Separation for Real-World Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07850/) (2019)
- [Image and Video Tokenization with Binary Spherical Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07548/) (2024)
- [VCT: A Video Compression Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07307/) (2022)
- [Deep Generative Adversarial Compression Artifact Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02518/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The exponential growth of visual data in digital communications has intensified the need for efficient compression techniques that balance rate-distortion performance with computational feasibility. While recent neural compression approaches have shown promise, they still struggle with fundamental challenges: preserving perceptual quality at high compression ratios, computational efficiency, and adaptability to diverse visual content. This paper introduces GANCompress, a novel neural compression framework that synergistically combines Binary Spherical Quantization (BSQ) with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to address these challenges. Our approach employs a transformer-based autoencoder with an enhanced BSQ bottleneck that projects latent representations onto a hypersphere, enabling efficient discretization with bounded quantization error. This is followed by a specialized GAN architecture incorporating frequency-domain attention and color consistency optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that GANCompress achieves substantial improvement in compression efficiency -- reducing file sizes by up to 100x with minimal visual distortion. Our method outperforms traditional codecs like H.264 by 12-15% in perceptual metrics while maintaining comparable PSNR/SSIM values, with 2.4x faster encoding and decoding speeds. On standard benchmarks including ImageNet-1k and COCO2017, GANCompress sets a new state-of-the-art, reducing FID from 0.72 to 0.41 (43% improvement) compared to previous methods while maintaining higher throughput. This work presents a significant advancement in neural compression technology with promising applications for real-time visual communication systems.