Learned Compression of High Dimensional Image Datasets

Elizabeth Cole, Qingxi Meng, John Pauly, Shreyas Vasanawala; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2022, pp. 1748-1752

In many applications, such as burst photography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), multiple images are acquired to reduce the noise of the eventual reconstructed image. However, this leads to very high dimensional datasets which have redundant information across the various acquired images. In MRI, multiple images are acquired via multiple RF coil arrays in the scanner. Afterwards, coil compression is performed to convert the original set of coil images into a smaller set of virtual coil images to enable smaller datasets and faster computation time. However, traditional iterative coil compression methods are lossy and time-consuming. In this work, we propose a novel neural network-based coil compression method in pursuit of higher reconstruction accuracy and faster coil compression. Our learned compression method achieves up to 1.5x lower NRMSE and up to 10 times runtime speed compared to traditional methods on a benchmark test dataset.