Classical vs. neural network-based PCA approaches for lossy image compression: Similarities and differences

Abstract

The paper describes three lossy data compression techniques based on the principal component analysis (PCA), which are compared using the image compression task. The presented approach uses both classical PCA method based on the eigen-decomposition of the image data covariance matrix and two different neural network structures. The first neural structure is a two-layer feed-forward network with supervised learning acting as the so-called autoencoder, and the second one is a single-layered network with an unsupervised learning method commonly known as the generalized Hebbian algorithm. For each compression method mentioned above, the influence of the number of image segments (frames) and the number of eigenvalues/eigenvectors on the compression ratio and the image quality are examined using three different gray-scale test images. The paper also addresses a vital implementation issue regarding selecting appropriate data types to represent the compressed data. The paper’s main conclusion is that the classical PCA method outperforms its neural counterparts, both in terms of the decompressed image quality and the time required to perform the compression procedure. The positive aspect of using neural networks as a tool for PCA-based lossy data compression is that they do not require calculating the correlation matrix explicitly and thus can be used in online data acquisition schemes.