Lossy intermediate deep learning feature compression and evaluation

With the unprecedented success of deep learning in computer vision tasks, many cloud-based visual analysis applications are powered by deep learning models. However, the deep learning models are also characterized with high computational complexity and are task-specific, which may hinder the large-scale implementation of the conventional data communication paradigms. To enable a better balance among bandwidth usage, computational load and the generalization capability for cloud-end servers, we propose to compress and transmit intermediate deep learning features instead of visual signals and ultimately utilized features. The proposed strategy also provides a promising way for the standardization of deep feature coding. As the first attempt to this problem, we present a lossy compression framework and evaluation metrics for intermediate deep feature compression. Comprehensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods and the feasibility of the proposed data transmission strategy. It is worth mentioning that the proposed compression framework and evaluation metrics have been adopted into the ongoing AVS (Audio Video Coding Standard Workgroup) - Visual Feature Coding Standard.