An efficient deep quantized compressed sensing coding framework of natural images

Traditional image compressed sensing (CS) coding frameworks solve an inverse problem that is based on the measurement coding tools (prediction, quantization, entropy coding, etc.) and the optimization based image reconstruction method. These CS coding frameworks face the challenges of improving the coding efficiency at the encoder, while also suffering from high computational complexity at the decoder. In this paper, we move forward a step and propose a novel deep network based CS coding framework of natural images, which consists of three sub-networks: sampling sub-network, offset sub-network and reconstruction sub-network that responsible for sampling, quantization and reconstruction, respectively. By cooperatively utilizing these sub-networks, it can be trained in the form of an end-to-end metric with a proposed rate-distortion optimization loss function. The proposed framework not only improves the coding performance, but also reduces the computational cost of the image reconstruction dramatically. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of achieving superior rate-distortion performance against state-of-the-art methods.