End-to-End JPEG Decoding and Artifacts Suppression Using Heterogeneous Residual Convolutional Neural Network

Existing deep learning models separate JPEG artifacts suppression from the decoding protocol as independent task. In this work, we take one step forward to design a true end-to-end heterogeneous residual convolutional neural network (HR-CNN) with spectrum decomposition and heterogeneous reconstruction mechanism. Benefitting from the full CNN architecture and GPU acceleration, the proposed model considerably improves the reconstruction efficiency. Numerical experiments show that the overall reconstruction speed reaches to the same magnitude of the standard CPU JPEG decoding protocol, while both decoding and artifacts suppression are completed together. We formulate the JPEG artifacts suppression task as an interactive process of decoding and image detail reconstructions. A heterogeneous, fully convolutional, mechanism is proposed to particularly address the uncorrelated nature of different spectral channels. Directly starting from the JPEG code in k-space, the network first extracts the spectral samples channel by channel, and restores the spectral snapshots with expanded throughput. These intermediate snapshots are then heterogeneously decoded and merged into the pixel space image. A cascaded residual learning segment is designed to further enhance the image details. Experiments verify that the model achieves outstanding performance in JPEG artifacts suppression, while its full convolutional operations and elegant network structure offers higher computational efficiency for practical online usage compared with other deep learning models on this topic.