JPEG Artifacts Removal via Compression Quality Ranker-Guided Networks

JPEG Artifacts Removal via Compression Quality Ranker-Guided Networks

Menglu Wang, Xueyang Fu, Zepei Sun, Zheng-Jun Zha

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 566-572. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/79

Existing deep learning-based image de-blocking methods use only pixel-level loss functions to guide network training. The JPEG compression factor, which reflects the degradation degree, has not been fully utilized. However, due to the non-differentiability, the compression factor cannot be directly utilized to train deep networks. To solve this problem, we propose compression quality ranker-guided networks for this specific JPEG artifacts removal. We first design a quality ranker to measure the compression degree, which is highly correlated with the JPEG quality. Based on this differentiable ranker, we then propose one quality-related loss and one feature matching loss to guide de-blocking and perceptual quality optimization. In addition, we utilize dilated convolutions to extract multi-scale features, which enables our single model to handle multiple compression quality factors. Our method can implicitly use the information contained in the compression factors to produce better results. Experiments demonstrate that our model can achieve comparable or even better performance in both quantitative and qualitative measurements.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Perception
Computer Vision: Computational Photography, Photometry, Shape from X
Machine Learning: Deep Learning: Convolutional networks