Interview with Ionut Schiopu – ICIP 2020 award winner

Ionut Schiopu and Adrian Munteanu received a Top Viewed Special Session Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2020) for their paper "A study of prediction methods based on machine learning techniques for lossless image coding". Here, Ionut Schiopu tells us more about their work. The research topic of our paper is to introduce a more efficient algorithm for lossless image compression based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques, where the main objective is to minimize the amount of data required to represent the input image without any information loss. In recent years, a new research strategy for coding has emerged by exploring the advances brought by modern ML techniques by proposing novel hybrid coding solutions where specific modules in conventional coding frameworks are replaced with more efficient modules based on ML techniques. The paper follows this research strategy and uses a deep neural network to replace the prediction module in the conventional coding framework.