# A Noise Constrained Diffusion (NC-Diffusion) Framework for High Fidelity Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06568 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06568/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion for compression and wireless, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 49 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion for compression and wireless](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-for-compression-and-wireless/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [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)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09472/) (2023)
- [Deblurring via Stochastic Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02475/) (2021)
- [SinSR: Diffusion-Based Image Super-Resolution in a Single Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14760/) (2023)
- [FreeU: Free Lunch in Diffusion U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11497/) (2023)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06950/) (2022)
- [Inversion by Direct Iteration: An Alternative to Denoising Diffusion for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11435/) (2023)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Wavelet-based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00306/) (2023)
- [Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10325/) (2023)
- [Improving Statistical Fidelity for Neural Image Compression with Implicit Local Likelihood Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11189/) (2023)
- [Lossy Compression with Gaussian Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08889/) (2022)
- [Multi-Realism Image Compression with a Conditional Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13824/) (2022)
- [Multiscale Structure Guided Diffusion for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01789/) (2022)
- [LightenDiffusion: Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement with Latent-Retinex Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08939/) (2024)
- [Pyramid Diffusion Models For Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10028/) (2023)
- [Text + Sketch: Image Compression at Ultra Low Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01944/) (2023)

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

- [Recasting DiT for Extreme Image Compression with Hierarchical Visual Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the great success of diffusion models in image generation, diffusion-based image compression is attracting increasing interests. However, due to the random noise introduced in the diffusion learning, they usually produce reconstructions with deviation from the original images, leading to suboptimal compression results. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a Noise Constrained Diffusion (NC-Diffusion) framework for high fidelity image compression. Unlike existing diffusion-based compression methods that add random Gaussian noise and direct the noise into the image space, the proposed NC-Diffusion formulates the quantization noise originally added in the learned image compression as the noise in the forward process of diffusion. Then a noise constrained diffusion process is constructed from the ground-truth image to the initial compression result generated with quantization noise. The NC-Diffusion overcomes the problem of noise mismatch between compression and diffusion, significantly improving the inference efficiency. In addition, an adaptive frequency-domain filtering module is developed to enhance the skip connections in the U-Net based diffusion architecture, in order to enhance high-frequency details. Moreover, a zero-shot sample-guided enhancement method is designed to further improve the fidelity of the image. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve the best performance compared with existing methods.