  Lossy image compression algorithms are pervasively used to reduce the size of
images transmitted over the web and recorded on data storage media. However, we
pay for their high compression rate with visual artifacts degrading the user
experience. Deep convolutional neural networks have become a widespread tool to
address high-level computer vision tasks very successfully. Recently, they have
found their way into the areas of low-level computer vision and image
processing to solve regression problems mostly with relatively shallow
networks.
  We present a novel 12-layer deep convolutional network for image compression
artifact suppression with hierarchical skip connections and a multi-scale loss
function. We achieve a boost of up to 1.79 dB in PSNR over ordinary JPEG and an
improvement of up to 0.36 dB over the best previous ConvNet result. We show
that a network trained for a specific quality factor (QF) is resilient to the
QF used to compress the input image - a single network trained for QF 60
provides a PSNR gain of more than 1.5 dB over the wide QF range from 40 to 76.
