US Patent 10192327 Image compression with recurrent neural networks

Methods, and systems, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media for compressing data items with variable compression rate. A system includes an encoder sub-network configured to receive a system input image and to generate an encoded representation of the system input image, the encoder sub-network including a first stack of neural network layers including one or more LSTM neural network layers and one or more non-LSTM neural network layers, the first stack configured to, at each of a plurality of time steps, receive an input image for the time step that is derived from the system input image and generate a corresponding first stack output, and a binarizing neural network layer configured to receive a first stack output as input and generate a corresponding binarized output.