Super-tokens Auto-encoders for image compression and reconstruction in IoT applications

Abstract

New telecommunications networks are enabling powerful AI applications for smart cities and transport. These applications require real-time processing of large amounts of media data. Sending data to the cloud for processing is very difficult due to latency and energy constraints. Lossy compression can help, but traditional codecs may not provide enough quality or be efficient enough for resource-constrained devices. This paper proposes a new image compression and processing approach based on variational auto-encoders (VAEs). This VAE-based method aims to efficiently compress images while still allowing for high-quality reconstruction and object detection tasks. The encoder is designed to be lightweight and suitable for devices with limited computing power. The decoder is more complex and uses multi-level vector quantization to reconstruct high-resolution images. This approach allows for a simple encoder on edge devices and a powerful decoder on cloud servers. Key contributions include a low-complexity encoder, a new VAE model based on vector quantization, and a framework for using VAEs in IoT. The first experiments on reconstructed images on CelebA and ImageNet100 datasets show promising results in terms of MS-SSIM, PSNR, MSE and rFID compared to the literature and the ability of our approach to be used in IoT applications. Our approach presents results similar to complex algorithms like compression algorithms BPG in term of trade-off rate-distortion, and hierarchical auto-encoder (HQA) in terms of image reconstruction quality.