  The field of video compression has developed some of the most sophisticated
and efficient compression algorithms known in the literature, enabling very
high compressibility for little loss of information. Whilst some of these
techniques are domain specific, many of their underlying principles are
universal in that they can be adapted and applied for compressing different
types of data. In this work we present DeepCABAC, a compression algorithm for
deep neural networks that is based on one of the state-of-the-art video coding
techniques. Concretely, it applies a Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic
Coder (CABAC) to the network's parameters, which was originally designed for
the H.264/AVC video coding standard and became the state-of-the-art for
lossless compression. Moreover, DeepCABAC employs a novel quantization scheme
that minimizes the rate-distortion function while simultaneously taking the
impact of quantization onto the accuracy of the network into account.
Experimental results show that DeepCABAC consistently attains higher
compression rates than previously proposed coding techniques for neural network
compression. For instance, it is able to compress the VGG16 ImageNet model by
x63.6 with no loss of accuracy, thus being able to represent the entire network
with merely 8.7MB. The source code for encoding and decoding can be found at
https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/DeepCABAC.
