The Rate-Distortion-Accuracy Tradeoff: JPEG Case Study

JPEG is an old yet popular image compression format, sup-ported by all imaging devices and software packages. A key ingredientgoverning its performance are the two quantization tables (for Luma andChroma) that dictate the loss induced on each DCT coefficient. Pastwork has offered various ideas for better tuning these tables, mainly fo-cusing on rate-distortion performance and using derivative-free optimiza-tion techniques. This work offers a novel optimal tuning of these tablesvia continuous optimization, leveraging a differential implementation ofboth the JPEG encoder-decoder and an entropy estimator. This enablesus to offer a unified framework that considers the interplay between fourperformance measures: rate, distortion, perceptual quality, and classi-fication accuracy. We also propose a deep-neural network design thatautomatically assigns optimized quantization tables to each incomingimage. In all these fronts, we report a substantial boost in performanceby a simple and easily implemented modification of these tables.

• Machine Perception

• Algorithms and Theory