Towards an Efficient Facial Image Compression with Neural Networks

Digital images are more and more part of everyday life. Efficient compression methods are needed to reduce the disk-space usage for their storage and the bandwidth for their transmission while keeping the resolution and the visual quality of the reconstructed images as close to the original images as possible. Not all images have the same importance. The facial images are being extensively used in many applications (e.g., law enforcement, social networks) and require high efficient facial image compression schemes in order to not compromise face recognition and identification (e.g., for surveillance and security scenarios). For this reason, we propose a promising approach that consists of a custom loss that combines the two tasks of image compression and face recognition. The results show that our method compresses efficiently face images guaranteeing high perceptive quality and face verification accuracy.