earticle

영어

Image compression-decompression methods have become increasingly crucial in modern times, facilitating the transfer of high-quality images while minimizing file size and internet traffic. Historically, early image compression relied on rudimentary codecs, aiming to compress and decompress data with minimal loss of image quality. Recently, a novel compression framework leveraging colorization techniques has emerged. These methods, originally developed for infusing grayscale images with color, have found application in image compression, leading to colorization-based coding. Within this framework, the encoder plays a crucial role in automatically extracting representative pixels—referred to as color seeds—and transmitting them to the decoder. The decoder, utilizing colorization methods, reconstructs color information for the remaining pixels based on the transmitted data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to image compression, wherein we decompose the compression task into grayscale image compression and colorization tasks. Unlike conventional colorization-based coding, our method focuses on the colorization process rather than the extraction of color seeds. Moreover, we employ the Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Model (DDNM) for colorization, ensuring high-quality color restoration and contributing to superior compression rates. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves higher-quality decompressed images compared to standard JPEG and JPEG2000 compression schemes, particularly in high compression rate scenarios.