Papers › Practical Full Resolution Learned Lossless Image Compression

Practical Full Resolution Learned Lossless Image Compression

30 Nov 2018CVPR 2019 6arXiv:1811.12817archive 2025-07-28

Fabian Mentzer, Eirikur Agustsson, Michael Tschannen, Radu Timofte, Luc van Gool

We propose the first practical learned lossless image compression system, L3C, and show that it outperforms the popular engineered codecs, PNG, WebP and JPEG 2000. At the core of our method is a fully parallelizable hierarchical probabilistic model for adaptive entropy coding which is optimized end-to-end for the compression task. In contrast to recent autoregressive discrete probabilistic models such as PixelCNN, our method i) models the image distribution jointly with learned auxiliary representations instead of exclusively modeling the image distribution in RGB space, and ii) only requires three forward-passes to predict all pixel probabilities instead of one for each pixel. As a result, L3C obtains over two orders of magnitude speedups when sampling compared to the fastest PixelCNN variant (Multiscale-PixelCNN). Furthermore, we find that learning the auxiliary representation is crucial and outperforms predefined auxiliary representations such as an RGB pyramid significantly.

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Code

fab-jul/L3C-PyTorch officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchGPL-3.0 report
PaulEmmanuelSotir/DeepCV mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
fab-jul/torchac mentioned on GitHubpytorchGPL-3.0 report
tuatruog/astrocompress mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Image Compression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Compression ImageNet32 L3C bpsp 4.76 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Image Compression ImageNet32 JPEG2000 bpsp 6.35 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Image Compression ImageNet32 PNG bpsp 6.42 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

PixelCNN

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