Abstract: Variable rate is a requirement for flexible and adaptable image and video compression. However, deep image compression methods (DIC) are optimized for a single fixed rate-distortion (R-D) tradeoff. While this can be addressed by training multiple models for different tradeoffs, the memory requirements increase proportionally to the number of models. Scaling the bottleneck representation of a shared autoencoder can provide variable rate compression with a single shared autoencoder. However, the R-D performance using this simple mechanism degrades in low bitrates, and also shrinks the effective range of bitrates. To address these limitations, we formulate the problem of variable R-D optimization for DIC, and propose modulated autoencoders (MAEs), where the representations of a shared autoencoder are adapted to the specific R-D tradeoff via a modulation network. Jointly training this modulated autoencoder and the modulation network provides an effective way to navigate the R-D operational curve. Our experiments show that the proposed method can achieve almost the same R-D performance of independent models with significantly fewer parameters.

Abstract: Dual-camera systems commonly employed in surveillance serve as the foundation for RGB-infrared (IR) cross-modality person re-identification (ReID). However, significant modality differences give rise to inferior performance compared to single-modality scenarios. Furthermore, most existing studies in this area rely on supervised training with meticulously labeled datasets. Labeling RGB-IR image pairs is more complex than labeling conventional image data, and deploying pretrained models on unlabeled datasets can lead to catastrophic performance degradation. In contrast to previous solutions that focus solely on cross-modality or domain adaptation issues, this article presents an end-to-end unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) framework for the cross-modality person ReID, which can simultaneously address both of these challenges. This model employs source domain classes, target domain clusters, and unclustered instance samples for the training, maximizing the comprehensive use of the dataset. Moreover, it addresses the problem of mismatched clustering labels between the two modalities in the target domain by incorporating a label matching module that reassigns reliable clusters with labels, ensuring correspondence between different modality labels. We construct the loss function by incorporating distinctiveness loss and multiplicity loss, both of which are determined by the similarity of neighboring features in the predicted feature space and the difference between distant features. This approach enables efficient feature clustering and cluster class assignment to occur concurrently. Eight UDA cross-modality person ReID experiments are conducted on three real datasets and six synthetic datasets. The experimental results unequivocally demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art algorithms to a significant degree. Notably, in RegDB → RegDB_light, the Rank-1 accuracy exhibits a remarkable improvement of 8.24%.

Abstract: Neural networks can be successfully used for cross-component prediction in video coding. In particular, attention-based architectures are suitable for chroma intra prediction using luma information because of their capability to model relations between difierent channels. However, the complexity of such methods is still very high and should be further reduced, especially for decoding. In this paper, a cost-effective attention-based neural network is designed for chroma intra prediction. Moreover, with the goal of further improving coding performance, a novel approach is introduced to utilize more boundary information effectively. In addition to improving prediction, a simplification methodology is also proposed to reduce inference complexity by simplifying convolutions. The proposed schemes are integrated into H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) pipeline, and only one additional binary block-level syntax flag is introduced to indicate whether a given block makes use of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves up to −0.46%/−2.29%/−2.17% BD-rate reduction on Y/Cb/Cr components, respectively, compared with H.266/VVC anchor. Reductions in the encoding and decoding complexity of up to 22% and 61%, respectively, are achieved by the proposed scheme with respect to the previous attention-based chroma intra prediction method while maintaining coding performance.