Abstract
Contemporary image rescaling aims at embedding a high-resolution (HR) image into a low-resolution (LR) thumbnail image that contains embedded information for HR image reconstruction. Unlike traditional image super-resolution, this enables high-fidelity HR image restoration faithful to the original one, given the embedded information in the LR thumbnail. However, state-of-the-art image rescaling methods do not optimize the LR image file size for efficient sharing and fall short of real-time performance for ultra-high-resolution (e.g., 6K) image reconstruction. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel framework (HyperThumbnail) for real-time 6K rate-distortion-aware image rescaling. Our framework first embeds an HR image into a JPEG LR thumbnail by an encoder with our proposed quantization prediction module, which minimizes the file size of the embedding LR JPEG thumbnail while maximizing HR reconstruction quality. Then, an efficient frequency-aware decoder reconstructs a high-fidelity HR image from the LR one in real time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous image rescaling baselines in rate-distortion performance and can perform 6K image reconstruction in real time.
Ying-Cong Chen
Assistant Professor
Ying-Cong Chen is an Assistant Professor at AI Thrust, Information Hub of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou Campus). He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research lies in the broad area of computer vision and machine learning, aiming for empowering machine with the capacity to understand human appearance, physiology and psychology. His works contribute to a wide range of applications, including contactless health monitoring, semantic photo synthesis, and intelligent video surveillance.