Exploring Multimodal Knowledge for Image Compression via Large Foundation Models

Knowledge is an abstraction of factual principles of the physical world. Large foundation models encapsulate extensive multimodal knowledge into the parameters and thus invoke machine intelligence on various tasks. How to invoke the knowledge in these models to facilitate image compression lacks in-depth exploration. In this work, we aim to harness multimodal knowledge into ultra-low bitrate compression and propose Multimodal Knowledge-aware Image Compression (MKIC). Our key insight is that under the context of ultra-low bitrate compression, where the encoded representation is too sparse to represent enough information of the input signal, knowledge from the physical world is required to be incorporated into the compression. Thus, more shared patterns can be stored in the model together with sparse unique features also embedded into the bitstream. In light of two kinds of knowledge, namely natural visual knowledge and human language knowledge, we propose a novel Alternating Rate-Distortion Optimization to enhance the accuracy and compactness of global semantic text representation extraction, extract the local feature map that captures visual details, and integrate these multimodal representations into a large generative foundation model to achieve high-quality reconstruction. The proposed method relights the path of learned image coding, leveraging decoupled knowledge from large foundation models. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves superior comprehensive performance compared to various methods and shows great potential for ultra-low bitrate image compression.