Semantically Scalable Image Coding With Compression Of Feature Maps

In this paper, we consider a novel image coding paradigm, termed semantically scalable coding. In the new paradigm, coded bitstream serves for multiple different semantic analysis tasks, and different tasks require different semantic granularities of the image. Thus, the bitstream is designed to be scalable in the sense that progressive decoding of the bitstream provides coarse-to-fine semantic granularities. As a concrete example, we consider the task of coarse-grained and fine-grained image classification. We present a method to compress the multiple deep feature maps that are intermediate representations of an image passing a trained deep network. The deep-layer feature maps can serve for coarse-grained image classification while the shallow-layer feature maps can serve for fine-grained image classification. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, as well as the advantage of the semantically scalable coding paradigm.