Image Classification in JPEG Compression Domain for Malaria Infection Detection

Digital images are usually stored in compressed format. However, image classification typically takes decompressed images as inputs rather than compressed images. Therefore, performing image classification directly in the compression domain will eliminate the need for decompression, thus increasing efficiency and decreasing costs. However, there has been very sparse work on image classification in the compression domain. In this paper, we studied the feasibility of classifying images in their JPEG compression domain. We analyzed the underlying mechanisms of JPEG as an example and conducted classification on data from different stages during the compression. The images we used were malaria-infected red blood cells and normal cells. The training data include multiple combinations of DCT coefficients, DC values in both decimal and binary forms, the "scan" segment in both binary and decimal form, and the variable length of the entire bitstream. The result shows that LSTM can successfully classify the image in its compressed form, with accuracies around 80%. If using only coded DC values, we can achieve accuracies higher than 90%. This indicates that images from different classes can still be well separated in their JPEG compressed format. Our simulations demonstrate that the proposed compression domain-processing method can reduce the input data, and eliminate the image decompression step, thereby achieving significant savings on memory and computation time.