Overview of Visual Signal Compression towards Machine Vision

Machine analysis of visual signals has been providing fundamental infrastructure support for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. As such, the compact representation of visual signal towards machine analysis is critical in current AI systems. A straightforward and general pipeline of visual signal compression for machines is to compress the visual signal, then perform the machine analysis on the reconstructed visual signal for ultimate results. This pipeline naturally supports multiple machine vision tasks and human perception, and is denoted as visual signal compression towards machines (VSCM). This paper provides an overview to summarize the VSCM related technologies in terms of various modules, and envision the future development of VSCM.