Multi-Mode Intra Prediction for Learning-Based Image Compression

In recent years image compression techniques based on deep learning have achieved great success and their performances are gradually reaching the methods crafted by experts, such as JPEG, WebP, and Better Portable Graphics (BPG). A technique that is fundamental for modern image and video codecs is intra prediction, which takes advantage of local redundancy to predict the pixels from previously encoded neighbors. In this paper, we use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to develop a new intra-picture prediction mode. More specifically, we propose a multi-mode intra prediction approach that uses two CNN-based prediction modes and all intra modes previously implemented in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. We also propose a bit allocation technique that increases the bitstream only if the reconstruction error is significantly reduced. Experimental results evince a significant and consistent performance increase compared to other approaches that use a similar backbone architecture, with 28% bitrate reduction compared to the baseline codec.