Trajectory-Consistent Denoising Diffusion Codebook Models for Zero-Shot High-Fidelity Image Compression at Ultra-Low Bitrates

Abstract

Denoising Diffusion Codebook Models (DDCM) have emerged as a promising framework for zero-shot image compression by replacing stochastic sampling with discrete selection from a reproducible Gaussian codebook. By greedily picking noise vectors that best match the target image, DDCM encodes the generative trajectory into a compact sequence of indices for image compression. However, the target-guided noise selection provides only coarse guidance as the discrepancy between the denoiser's output and the target image is substantial. This discrepancy inevitably results in trajectory drift, necessitating massive codebooks to span the enlarged search space and extensive inference steps to gradually compensate for the deviation. In this paper, we propose the Trajectory-Consistent Diffusion Codebook Model (TC-DDCM) to address these inefficiencies. Rather than approximating the distant target, TC-DDCM navigates the generative process by strictly tracking a pre-computed inversion trajectory. This paradigm shift yields two critical advantages: 1) By minimizing the deviation to the proximal reference state along the trajectory, the search space is drastically shrunk, resulting in significantly smaller codebooks. 2) By aligning the generative steps with inversion methods, TC-DDCM achieves optimal reconstruction in a few inference steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TC-DDCM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot methods in rate-distortion-perception performance at ultra-low bitrates, making zero-shot diffusion-based compression practical.