Decouple Distortion from Perception: Region Adaptive Diffusion for Extreme-low Bitrate Perception Image Compression

Abstract

Leveraging the generative power of diffusion models, generative image compression has achieved impressive perceptual fidelity even at extremely low bitrates. However, current methods often neglect the non-uniform complexity of images, limiting their ability to balance global perceptual quality with local texture consistency and to allocate coding resources efficiently. To address this, we introduce the Map-guided Masking Realism Image Diffusion Codec (MRIDC), designed to optimize the trade- off between local distortion and global perceptual quality in extreme-low bitrate compression. MRIDC integrates a vector-quantized image encoder with a diffusion-based decoder. On the encoding side, we propose a Map-guided Latent Masking (MLM) module, which selectively masks elements in the latent space based on prior information, allowing adaptive resource allocation aligned with image complexity. On the decoding side, masked latents are completed using the Bidirectional Prediction Controllable Generation (BPCG) module, which guides the constrained generation process within the diffusion model to reconstruct the image. Experimental results show that MRIDC achieves state-of-the-art perceptual compression quality at extremely low bitrates, effectively preserving feature consistency in key regions and advancing the rate-distortion-perception performance curve, establishing new benchmarks in balancing compression efficiency with visual fidelity. Our code can be found at https://github.com/xjc97/mridc.