Learning Context-Based Nonlocal Entropy Modeling for Image Compression

The entropy of the codes usually serves as the rate loss in the recent learned lossy image compression methods. Precise estimation of the probabilistic distribution of the codes plays a vital role in reducing the entropy and boosting the joint rate-distortion performance. However, existing deep learning based entropy models generally assume the latent codes are statistically independent or depend on some side information or local context, which fails to take the global similarity within the context into account and thus hinders the accurate entropy estimation. To address this issue, we propose a special nonlocal operation for context modeling by employing the global similarity within the context. Specifically, due to the constraint of context, nonlocal operation is incalculable in context modeling. We exploit the relationship between the code maps produced by deep neural networks and introduce the proxy similarity functions as a workaround. Then, we combine the local and the global context via a nonlocal attention block and employ it in masked convolutional networks for entropy modeling. Taking the consideration that the width of the transforms is essential in training low distortion models, we finally produce a U-net block in the transforms to increase the width with manageable memory consumption and time complexity. Experiments on Kodak and Tecnick datasets demonstrate the priority of the proposed context-based nonlocal attention block in entropy modeling and the U-net block in low distortion situations. On the whole, our model performs favorably against the existing image compression standards and recent deep image compression models.