Recent contributions of semantic information theory reveal the set-element relationship between semantic and syntactic information, represented as synonymous relationships. In this paper, we propose a synonymous variational inference (SVI) method based on this synonymity viewpoint to re-analyze the perceptual image compression problem. It takes perceptual similarity as a typical synonymous criterion to build an ideal synonymous set (Synset), and approximate the posterior of its latent synonymous representation with a parametric density by minimizing a partial semantic KL divergence. This analysis theoretically proves that the optimization direction of perception image compression follows a triple tradeoff that can cover the existing rate-distortion-perception schemes. Additionally, we introduce synonymous image compression (SIC), a new image compression scheme that corresponds to the analytical process of SVI, and implement a progressive SIC codec to fully leverage the model's capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate comparable rate-distortion-perception performance using a single progressive SIC codec, thus verifying the effectiveness of our proposed analysis method.
View on arXiv@article{liang2025_2505.22438,
title={ Synonymous Variational Inference for Perceptual Image Compression },
author={ Zijian Liang and Kai Niu and Changshuo Wang and Jin Xu and Ping Zhang },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.22438},
year={ 2025 }
}