  Reducing the data footprint of visual content via image compression is
essential to reduce storage requirements, but also to reduce the bandwidth and
latency requirements for transmission. In particular, the use of compressed
images allows for faster transfer of data, and faster response times for visual
recognition in edge devices that rely on cloud-based services. In this paper,
we first analyze the impact of image compression using traditional codecs, as
well as recent state-of-the-art neural compression approaches, on three visual
recognition tasks: image classification, object detection, and semantic
segmentation. We consider a wide range of compression levels, ranging from 0.1
to 2 bits-per-pixel (bpp). We find that for all three tasks, the recognition
ability is significantly impacted when using strong compression. For example,
for segmentation mIoU is reduced from 44.5 to 30.5 mIoU when compressing to 0.1
bpp using the best compression model we evaluated. Second, we test to what
extent this performance drop can be ascribed to a loss of relevant information
in the compressed image, or to a lack of generalization of visual recognition
models to images with compression artefacts. We find that to a large extent the
performance loss is due to the latter: by finetuning the recognition models on
compressed training images, most of the performance loss is recovered. For
example, bringing segmentation accuracy back up to 42 mIoU, i.e. recovering 82%
of the original drop in accuracy.
