Learning to Rank Patches for Unbiased Image Redundancy Reduction
Authors: Yang Luo, Zhineng Chen, Peng Zhou, Zuxuan Wu, Xieping Gao, Yu-Gang Jiang

Images suffer from heavy spatial redundancy because pixels in neighboring regions are spatially correlated. Existing approaches strive to overcome this limitation by reducing less meaningful image regions. However current leading methods rely on supervisory signals. They may compel models to preserve content that aligns with labeled categories and discard content belonging to unlabeled categories. This categorical inductive bias makes these methods less effective in real-world scenarios. To address this issue we propose a self-supervised framework for image redundancy reduction called Learning to Rank Patches (LTRP). We observe that image reconstruction of masked image modeling models is sensitive to the removal of visible patches when the masking ratio is high (e.g. 90%). Building upon it we implement LTRP via two steps: inferring the semantic density score of each patch by quantifying variation between reconstructions with and without this patch and learning to rank the patches with the pseudo score. The entire process is self-supervised thus getting out of the dilemma of categorical inductive bias. We design extensive experiments on different datasets and tasks. The results demonstrate that LTRP outperforms both supervised and other self-supervised methods due to the fair assessment of image content.