Efficient Quality Controllable Neural Image Compression based on QD-Model

Neural image compression has achieved significant advancements, consistently outperforming traditional codecs in terms of performance. However, research on quality control algorithms for neural image compression is still lacking. In this paper, we propose a framework designed to control the quality of compressed images through a one-pass pre-analysis. First, we construct a foundational relationship between the quantization factor and compression distortion, utilizing variable rate neural image compression as the basis for quality control. Second, we introduce the image Content-Compression features-based Distortion Estimation Network (C<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>DEN) to efficiently fit the sample-adaptive Quantization-Distortion (QD) model. Leveraging the QD model, we convert the target quality into a quantization factor to control the compression model, enabling quality-controllable compression of samples. Experimental results show that the average quality errors on four different datasets are only 0.89%, 1.79%, 1.73%, and 1.61%. Compared with existing control methods, our method reduces the algorithm time complexity by 98.58%, 98.52%, 98.85%, and 98.50% while ensuring accuracy, which further demonstrates the superiority of our method.