LL-ICM: Image Compression for Low-level Machine Vision via Large Vision-Language Model

Image Compression for Machines (ICM) aims to compress images for machine vision tasks, while current methods mostly focus on the demands for high-level tasks. However, the quality of original images is usually not guaranteed in the real world, leading to even worse downstream task performance after compression. Thus, lowlevel (LL) restoration tasks should also be considered in ICM. In this paper, we propose the first ICM framework for LL machine vision tasks, namely LL-ICM, which optimizes the compression and LL processing performance simultaneously. Moreover, LL-ICM leverages large vision-language model (VLM) to solve different LL task within a single model, which is particularly useful when the distortion type of the original image is uncertain. As illustrated in Fig. 1(a), LL-ICM consists of a neural image codec and a VLM-based LL processing module. Given an original image with distortions, LL-ICM firstly compress it as X^{^}. Then, we extract a generalized feature F from X^{^}, which is then encoded as two representations, distortion type φ and caption σ. After that, the LL processing module receives X^ and its representations to generate the restored version of X^{^}, i.e., X^{^}_H. © 2025 IEEE