# SEAOTTER: Sensor Embedded Autoencoding with One-Time Transcode for Efficient Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03940/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Adan: Adaptive Nesterov Momentum Algorithm for Faster Optimizing Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06677/) (2022)
- [Split Computing and Early Exiting for Deep Learning Applications: Survey and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04505/) (2021)
- [Deep Residual Learning in the JPEG Transform Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11690/) (2018)
- [Computationally-Efficient Neural Image Compression with Shallow Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06244/) (2023)
- [Feature Coding in the Era of Large Models: Dataset, Test Conditions, and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04307/) (2024)
- [Sandwiched Compression: Repurposing Standard Codecs with Neural Network Wrappers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05887/) (2024)
- [Machine Perceptual Quality: Evaluating the Impact of Severe Lossy Compression on Audio and Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07957/) (2024)
- [MCUCoder: Adaptive Bitrate Learned Video Compression for IoT Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19442/) (2024)
- [Learned Compression for Compressed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09405/) (2024)
- [DeDelayed: Deleting Remote Inference Delay via On-Device Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13714/) (2025)
- [FRAPPE: Full Input, Residual Output Autoencoding with Projection Pursuit Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28992/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In robotics systems, vast amounts of visual data are easily captured at high resolution using low-cost, low-power hardware. Yet, limited bandwidth and on-device compute resources prevent full utilization when transmitted via conventional codecs like JPEG/MPEG. Newer codecs, like AV1/AVIF, improve the rate-distortion trade-off, but demand far more resources for encoding, impractical without custom ASICs. Recent asymmetric autoencoders deliver high quality under extreme power and bandwidth constraints, but add prohibitive decoding cost and use bespoke formats that ignore decades of infrastructure built around standards like JPEG. To address these limitations, we introduce a compression framework for cloud robotics based on a Sensor Embedded Autoencoder paired with a One-Time Transcode for Efficient Reconstruction (SEAOTTER). Because the sensor, cloud, and consumer stages face very different power and bandwidth budgets, SEAOTTER combines the compactness of a learned latent with the broad usability of a standard JPEG file. Since naive transcoding degrades performance, we propose a learnable JPEG color and quantization transform that enables increased accuracy for global, dense, and vision-language-based perception. Using SEAOTTER, we train both general-purpose and task-aware transcoding pipelines for a pre-trained, frozen encoder. At a compression ratio of 200:1 and compared to AVIF, we observe 7 times faster encoding, 3.5 times faster decoding, and +8% ImageNet top-1 accuracy, while retaining compatibility with JPEG infrastructure. Our code is available at https://github.com/UT-SysML/seaotter .