A region-based hierarchical image compression method with simulated visual perception

Most learned image compression methods focus on reducing the average code length of the image, which is unreasonable for the human visual system. Thus, appropriate bit allocation gains significance. This paper presents a novel end-to-end method for perceptual image compression, emphasizing content prioritization and a region-based hierarchical strategy. Firstly, our modified class activation mapping (CAM) can serve as the visual perception network for simulating human visual perception. On this basis, we develop an efficient compression system that leverages a discretized hybrid entropy model to allocate bits automatically according to the perceptual prioritization of image content. In our compression system, an image is compressed jointly and hierarchically with different standards, guided by the importance map extracted by the visual perception network. We introduce content-weighted perceptual metrics to evaluate visual quality more reasonably and objectively. Experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional codecs and recent content-oriented learned methods in overall performance. Compared with other methods, the proposed method reconstructs images that are more friendly to the human visual system.