Research
What Matters in Practical Learned Image Compression
One of the major differentiators unlocked by learned codecs relative to their hard-coded traditional counterparts is their ability to be optimized directly to appeal to the human visual system. Despit
One of the major differentiators unlocked by learned codecs relative to their hard-coded traditional counterparts is their ability to be optimized directly to appeal to the human visual system. Despite this potential, a perceptual yet practical image codec is yet to be proposed. In this work, we aim to close this gap. We conduct a comprehensive study of the key modeling choices that govern the design of a practical learned image codec, jointly optimized for perceptual quality and runtime — including within the ablations several novel techniques. We then perform performance-aware neural…
Source: Apple ML Research | 2026-05-07