面向机器视觉的文本提示引导的图像编码OA
Text Prompted Image Coding for Machine
近年来,随着物联网(Internet of Things,IoT)、语义通信以及智慧城市等经典机器间通信(Machine to Ma-chine,M2M)场景的快速发展,海量视觉数据在设备间的实时传输与高效处理成为了一项关键挑战.在此背景下,传统以人眼感知质量为核心的图像编码方法,因其优化目标与机器视觉任务需求存在本质差异,往往在面向机器视觉分析时出现分析精度不足的问题.为此,面向机器视觉的图像编码(Image Coding for Machine,ICM)应运而生,其核心目标是在保证下游机器视觉任务(如分类、检测、分割等)分析精度的同时,实现尽可能低的编码码率,从而更好地适配M2M场景中的带宽与存储约束.然而,现有ICM方法仍面临两大瓶颈:其一,在极低码率条件下性能急剧下降.这是由于现有方法多依赖于端到端的非线性变换提取视觉特征,未能充分挖掘和利用图像中高层语义信息的紧凑表示,导致特征编码效率不足;其二,在开放场景下的泛化能力弱.多数方法针对单一任务、单一数据集进行优化,缺乏对未知类别、跨域数据的适应能力,难以在实际动态环境中保持稳定的分析性能.为突破上述限制,本文提出一种文本提示引导的面向机器视觉图像编码框架(Text-prompted Image Coding for Machine,T-ICM).该框架的核心思想是将图像信息解耦为语义信息与纹理信息两个互补的组成部分,其中,语义信息以结构化文本提示(如对象类别、位置描述)的形式进行表示与编码,纹理信息则通过一种任务无关的通用视觉特征进行提取与压缩.在编码端,文本提示因其高度抽象和语义紧凑的特性,可以显著降低整体码率;通用特征则通过我们提出的分组特征编码模块进行高效压缩.在解码端,文本提示不仅用于直接解析完成分类、检测等任务,更重要的是作为引导信号,通过提示编码器与掩膜解码器,动态调整重建通用特征的语义感知区域,实现特征层面的域自适应与任务适配,从而显著提升模型在开放场景下的鲁棒性.本文在多个标准数据集与任务上对T-ICM进行了全面评估.实验表明,在语义分割和实例分割等密集预测任务上,T-ICM在极低码率下仍能保持接近原始图像输入的分析精度,其性能显著优于H.266/VVC、基于深度学习的图像编码器以及现有的其他ICM方法.本研究通过将语义信息迁移至高度压缩的文本模态进行传输,并利用其引导特征重建,T-ICM在编码效率与任务性能之间实现了更优的权衡,为未来语义通信、边缘智能协同,以及自适应机器视觉系统的发展提供了新的思路与技术支撑.
In recent years,with the rapid development of classic machine-to-machine(M2M)communication scenari-os such as the internet of things(IoT),semantic communication,and smart cities,the real-time transmission and efficient processing of massive visual data between devices have become a critical challenge.In this context,traditional image cod-ing methods,which are primarily optimized for human perceptual quality,often suffer from insufficient analysis accuracy when applied to machine vision tasks due to a fundamental mismatch between their optimization objectives and the require-ments of machine analysis.Consequently,image coding for machine(ICM)has emerged,aiming to maintain high analysis accuracy for downstream machine vision tasks(e.g.,classification,detection,segmentation)while achieving the lowest pos-sible bitrate,thereby better adapting to the bandwidth and storage constraints in M2M scenarios.However,existing ICM methods still face two major bottlenecks.First,their performance degrades sharply under extremely low bitrates.This is be-cause most current approaches rely on end-to-end nonlinear transformations to extract visual features,failing to fully exploit the compact representation of high-level semantic information within images,which leads to inefficient feature coding.Sec-ond,they exhibit weak generalization in open-set scenarios.Most methods are optimized for single tasks or single datasets,lacking the adaptability to unseen categories or cross-domain data,and thus struggle to maintain stable analytical perfor-mance in practical,dynamic environments.To overcome these limitations,this paper proposes a novel text-prompted image coding for machine(T-ICM)framework.The core idea is to decouple image information into two complementary compo-nents:semantic information and texture information.The semantic information is represented and encoded in the form of structured text prompts(e.g.,object categories,location descriptions),while the texture information is extracted and com-pressed as task-agnostic general visual features.At the encoder side,the text prompts,owing to their highly abstract and se-mantically compact nature,can significantly reduce the overall bitrate.The general features are efficiently compressed via our proposed grouped feature coding module.At the decoder side,the text prompts serve not only for direct parsing to ac-complish tasks like classification and detection but,more importantly,act as guidance signals.Through a prompt encoder and a mask decoder,they dynamically adjust the semantically relevant regions of the reconstructed general features,en-abling feature-level domain adaptation and task-specific adaptation,thereby significantly enhancing the model's robustness in open-set scenarios.The proposed T-ICM is comprehensively evaluated on multiple standard datasets and tasks.Experi-ments demonstrate that on dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation and instance segmentation,T-ICM can maintain analysis accuracy close to that of using the original uncompressed images even at very low bitrates,significantly outperforming H.266/VVC,learned image codecs,and other existing ICM methods.By migrating semantic information to the highly compressed text modality for transmission and utilizing it to guide feature reconstruction,T-ICM achieves a supe-rior trade-off between coding efficiency and task performance.This work provides a novel perspective and technical founda-tion for the future development of semantic communication,collaborative edge intelligence,and adaptive machine vision systems.
黄志勐;高峰;杨帆;马思伟
北京大学计算机学院,北京 100871北京大学艺术学院,北京 100871北京大学艺术学院,北京 100871北京大学计算机学院,北京 100871
信息技术与安全科学
视频编码智能编码特征编码面向机器视觉的特征编码深度学习信号处理
video codingintelligent compressionfeature codingfeature coding for machinedeep learningsignal processing
《电子学报》 2026 (1)
19-31,13
国家自然科学基金(No.62025101,No.62176006)中国博士后科学基金(No.2025M771511) National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.62025101,No.62176006)China Postdoc-toral Science Foundation(No.2025M771511)
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