DEFENDING AGAINST NOISE BY CHARACTERIZING THE RATE-DISTORTION FUNCTIONS IN END-TO-END NOISY IMAGE COMPRESSION

There has been an increasing consensus that precise understanding of the rate-distortion (RD) characteristics plays a critical role in image and video coding. In this paper, we explore the RD behaviors of end-to-end image compression in the real-world application scenario that the images could be corrupted by noise at different levels. With the RD behaviors that all images share, we develop a deep learning driven pre-analytical model which fully exploits the properties of RD functions and allows us to improve the quality with economized coding bits. The proposed approach does not require any prior knowledge of the noise level, and could effectively defend against the noise through the end-to-end compression. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme offers the best promise in predicting RD behaviors, and naturally avoids the unnecessary bits consumption.