C3: High-Performance and Low-Complexity Neural Compression from a Single Image or Video
Authors: Hyunjik Kim, Matthias Bauer, Lucas Theis, Jonathan Richard Schwarz, Emilien Dupont

Most neural compression models are trained on large datasets of images or videos in order to generalize to unseen data. Such generalization typically requires large and expressive architectures with a high decoding complexity. Here we introduce C3 a neural compression method with strong rate-distortion (RD) performance that instead overfits a small model to each image or video separately. The resulting decoding complexity of C3 can be an order of magnitude lower than neural baselines with similar RD performance. C3 builds on COOL-CHIC [Ladune et al 2023] and makes several simple and effective improvements for images. We further develop new methodology to apply C3 to videos. On the CLIC2020 image benchmark we match the RD performance of VTM the reference implementation of the H.266 codec with less than3k MACs/pixel for decoding. On the UVG video benchmark we match the RD performance of the Video Compression Transformer [Mentzer er al 2022] a well-established neural video codec with less than 5k MACs/pixel for decoding.