Learning to Render Better Image Previews
Shumeet Baluja, David Marwood, Nick Johnston, Michele Covell · 2019
A rapidly increasing portion of Internet traffic is dominated by requests from mobile devices with limited and metered bandwidth constraints. To satisfy these requests, it has become standard practice for websites to transmit small and extremely compressed image previews as part of the initial page-load process. Recent work, based on an adaptive triangulation of the target image, has performed well at extreme compression rates: 200 bytes or less. Gains have been shown, in terms of PSNR and SSIM, over both JPEG and WebP standards. However, qualitative assessments and preservation of semantic content can be less favorable. We present a novel method to significantly improve the reconstruction quality of the original image that requires no changes to the encoded information. Our neural-based decoding triples the amount of semantic-level content preservation while also improving both SSIM and PSNR scores. In addition, by keeping the same encoding stream, our solution is completely inter-operable with the original, and remains suitable for small-device deployment.