MLIC++: Linear Complexity Attention-based Multi-Reference Entropy Modeling for Learned Image Compression

Recently, learned image compression has achieved impressive performance. The entropy model, which estimates the distribution of the latent representation, plays a crucial role in enhancing rate-distortion performance. However, existing global context modules rely on computationally intensive quadratic complexity computations to capture global correlations. This quadratic complexity imposes limitations on the potential of high-resolution image coding. Moreover, effectively capturing local, global, and channel-wise contexts with acceptable even linear complexity within a single entropy model remains a challenge. To address these limitations, we propose the Linear Complexity Attention-based Multi-Reference Entropy Model (MEM++). MEM++ effectively captures the diverse range of correlations inherent in the latent representation. Specifically, the latent representation is first divided into multiple slices. When compressing a particular slice, the previously compressed slices serve as its channel-wise contexts. To capture local contexts without sacrificing performance, we introduce a novel checkerboard attention module. Additionally, to capture global contexts, we propose the linear complexity attention-based global correlations capturing by leveraging the decomposition of the softmax operation. The attention map of the previously decoded slice is implicitly computed and employed to predict global correlations in the current slice. Based on MEM++, we propose image compression model MLIC++. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our MLIC++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing BD-rate by 13.39% on the Kodak dataset compared to VTM-17.0 in PSNR. Furthermore, MLIC++ exhibits linear GPU memory consumption with resolution, making it highly suitable for high-resolution image coding. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/JiangWeibeta/MLIC.