MobileViT-GAN: A Generative Model for Low Bitrate Image Coding
Yifei Pei, Ying Liu, Nam Ling · 2023
Effective image coding techniques are crucial for digital image storage and transmission. Traditional methods struggle to maintain high visual quality at low bitrates. In this paper, we present MobileViT-GAN, a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture for low bitrate image compression. We propose a lightweight transformer-based discriminator to improve coding performance, compared to convolutional neural network-based discriminators. Additionally, we introduce a smoothness loss function to mitigate artifacts in decoded images, further improving visual quality in low bitrate image coding. We evaluate our proposed method against traditional and state-of-the-art GAN-based image compression techniques, showcasing its superiority in terms of compression ratio and decoded image quality.