Human-Machine Collaborative Image and Video Compression: A Survey

Traditional image and video compression methods are designed to maintain the quality of human visual perception, which makes it necessary to reconstruct the image or video before machine analysis. Compression methods oriented towards machine vision tasks make it possible to use the bit stream directly for machine vision tasks, but it is difficult for them to decode high quality images. To bridge the gap between machine vision tasks and signal-level representation, researchers present plenty of the human-machine collaborative compression methods. In order to provide researchers with a comprehensive understanding of this field and promote the development of image and video compression, we present this survey. In this work, we give a problem definition and explore the relationship and application scenarios of different methods. In addition, we provide a comparative analysis of existing methods on compression and machine vision tasks performance. Finally, we provide a discussion of several directions that are most promising for future research. ©2024 H. Li, X. Zhang, S. Wang, S. Wang and J. Pan.