Evaluating Strong Idempotence of Image Codec

In this paper, we first propose the concept of strong idempotent codec based on idempotent codec. The idempotence of codec refers to the stability of codec to re-compression. Similarly, we define the strong idempotence of codec as the stability of codec to multiple quality re-compression, which is an important feature of codec in the context of cloud transcoding. We provide a detailed example of strong idempotent codec with known source distribution. Further, we formalize a testing protocol to evaluate the strong idempotence of image codec. And finally, we evaluate the strong idempotence of current image codecs, including traditional codec and recent neural codec. Experimental results show that current image codecs are not stable to multi-round re-compression with different qualities, even if they are close to idempotent.