# REMAC: Reference-Based Martian Asymmetrical Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18547 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18547/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (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)
- [Channel-wise Autoregressive Entropy Models for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08739/) (2020)
- [Learned Image Compression with Mixed Transformer-CNN Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14978/) (2023)
- [Checkerboard Context Model for Efficient Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15306/) (2021)
- [The Devil Is in the Details: Window-based Attention for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08450/) (2022)
- [Image Super-Resolution by Neural Texture Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00834/) (2019)
- [CrossNet: An End-to-end Reference-based Super Resolution Network using Cross-scale Warping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10547/) (2018)
- [MASA-SR: Matching Acceleration and Spatial Adaptation for Reference-Based Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02299/) (2021)
- [Memory-Efficient Learned Image Compression with Pruned Hyperprior Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10083/) (2022)
- [RFD-ECNet: Extreme Underwater Image Compression with Reference to Feature Dictionar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08721/) (2023)
- [ShiftLIC: Lightweight Learned Image Compression with Spatial-Channel Shift Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23052/) (2025)
- [AsymLLIC: Asymmetric Lightweight Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17270/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Martian Terrain Recognition with Deep Constrained Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17633/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To expedite space exploration on Mars, it is indispensable to develop an efficient Martian image compression method for transmitting images through the constrained Mars-to-Earth communication channel. Although the existing learned compression methods have achieved promising results for natural images from earth, there remain two critical issues that hinder their effectiveness for Martian image compression: 1) They overlook the highly-limited computational resources on Mars; 2) They do not utilize the strong textitinter-image similarities across Martian images to advance image compression performance. Motivated by our empirical analysis of the strong textitintra- and textitinter-image similarities from the perspective of texture, color, and semantics, we propose a reference-based Martian asymmetrical image compression (REMAC) approach, which shifts computational complexity from the encoder to the resource-rich decoder and simultaneously improves compression performance. To leverage textitinter-image similarities, we propose a reference-guided entropy module and a ref-decoder that utilize useful information from reference images, reducing redundant operations at the encoder and achieving superior compression performance. To exploit textitintra-image similarities, the ref-decoder adopts a deep, multi-scale architecture with enlarged receptive field size to model long-range spatial dependencies. Additionally, we develop a latent feature recycling mechanism to further alleviate the extreme computational constraints on Mars. Experimental results show that REMAC reduces encoder complexity by 43.51% compared to the state-of-the-art method, while achieving a BD-PSNR gain of 0.2664 dB.