Efficient Deep Neural Network for Digital Image Compression Employing Rectified Linear Neurons

A compression technique for still digital images is proposed with deep neural networks (DNNs) employing rectified linear units (ReLUs). We tend to exploit the DNNs capabilities to find a reasonable estimate of the underlying compression/decompression relationships. We aim for a DNN for image compression purpose that has better generalization property and reduced training time and support real time operation. The use of ReLUs which map more plausibly to biological neurons, makes the training of our DNN significantly faster, shortens the encoding/decoding time, and improves its generalization ability. The introduction of the ReLUs establishes an efficient gradient propagation, induces sparsity in the proposed network, and is efficient in terms of computations making these networks suitable for real time compression systems. Experiments performed on standard real world images show that using ReLUs instead of logistic sigmoid units speeds up the training of the DNN by converging markedly faster. The evaluation of objective and subjective quality of reconstructed images also proves that our DNN achieves better generalization as most of the images are never seen by the network before.