Dilated convolutional neural network-based deep reference picture generation for video compression
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Science and Technology on Electro-optic Control Laboratory（光电控制技术重点实验室）；Charles Sturt University（查尔斯特大学）
Motion estimation and motion compensation are indispensable parts of inter prediction in video coding. Since the motion vector of objects is mostly in fractional pixel units, original reference pictures may not accurately provide a suitable reference for motion compensation. In this paper, we propose a deep reference picture generator which can create a picture that is more relevant to the current encoding frame, thereby further reducing temporal redundancy and improving video compression efficiency. Inspired by the recent progress of Convolutional Neural Network(CNN), this paper proposes to use a dilated CNN to build the generator. Moreover, we insert the generated deep picture into Versatile Video Coding(VVC) as a reference picture and perform a comprehensive set of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our network on the latest VVC Test Model VTM. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves on average 9.7% bit saving compared with VVC under low-delay P configuration.
This paper presents CompressAI, a platform that provides custom operations, layers, models and tools to research, develop and evaluate end-to-end image and video compression codecs. In particular, CompressAI includes pre-trained models and evaluation tools to compare learned methods with traditional codecs. Multiple models from the state-of-the-art on learned end-to-end compression have thus been reimplemented in PyTorch and trained from scratch. We also report objective comparison results using PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics vs. bit-rate, using the Kodak image dataset as test set. Although this fra…
The VVC codec is applied to the task of multispectral image (MSI) compression using adaptive and scalable coding structures. In a 'plain' VVC approach, concepts from picture-to-picture temporal prediction are employed for decorrelation along the MSI's spectral dimension. The popular principle component analysis (PCA) for spectral decorrelation is further evaluated in combination with VVC intra-coding for spatial decorrelation. This approach is referred to as PCA-VVC. A novel adaptive MSI compression algorithm, named HPCLS, is introduced, that uses PCA and inter-prediction for spectral and VVC …
Conventional video compression methods employ a linear transform and block motion model, and the steps of motion estimation, mode and quantization parameter selection, and entropy coding are optimized individually due to combinatorial nature of the end-to-end optimization problem. Learned video compression allows end-to-end rate-distortion optimized training of all nonlinear modules, quantization parameter and entropy model simultaneously. While previous work on learned video compression considered training a sequential video codec based on end-to-end optimization of cost averaged over pairs o…
Light field data records the amount of light at multiple points in space, captured e.g. by an array of cameras or by a light-field camera that uses microlenses. Since the storage and transmission requirements for such data are tremendous, compression techniques for light fields are gaining momentum in recent years. Although plenty of efficient compression formats do exist for still and moving images, only a little research on the impact of these methods on light field imagery is performed. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of state-of-the-art image and video compression methods on quality …
In recent years, deep neural networks have been utilized in a wide variety of applications including image generation. In particular, generative adversarial networks (GANs) are able to produce highly realistic pictures as part of tasks such as image compression. As with standard compression, it is desirable to be able to automatically assess the perceptual quality of generative images to monitor and control the encode process. However, existing image quality algorithms are ineffective on GAN generated content, especially on textured regions and at high compressions. Here we propose a new natur…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
We address end-to-end learned video compression with a special focus on better learning and utilizing temporal contexts. For temporal context mining, we propose to store not only the previously reconstructed frames, but also the propagated features into the generalized decoded picture buffer. From the stored propagated features, we propose to learn multi-scale temporal contexts, and re-fill the learned temporal contexts into the modules of our compression scheme, including the contextual encoder-decoder, the frame generator, and the temporal context encoder. Our scheme discards the paralleliza…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；DAMO Academy in Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）
Applications of surveillance video have developed rapidly in recent years to protect public safety and daily life, which often detect and recognize objects in video sequences. Traditional coding frameworks remove temporal redundancy in surveillance video by block-wise motion compensation, lacking the extraction and utilization of inherent structure information. In this paper, we figure out this issue by disentangling surveillance video into the structure of a global spatio-temporal feature (memory) for Group of Picture (GoP) and skeleton for each frame (clue). The memory is obtained by sequent…
Recent developments in optical sensors enable a wide range of applications for multispectral imaging, e.g., in surveillance, optical sorting, and life-science instrumentation. Increasing spatial and spectral resolution allows creating higher quality products, however, it poses challenges in handling such large amounts of data. Consequently, specialized compression techniques for multispectral images are required. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is known to be the state of the art in efficiency for both video coding and still image coding. In this paper, we propose a cross-spectral compress…
Task-Aware Encoder Control for Deep Video Compression
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；Shanghai Jiaotong University（上海交通大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
The rapid development of intelligent tasks, e.g., segmentation, detection, classification, etc, has brought an urgent need for semantic compression, which aims to reduce the compression cost while maintaining the original semantic information. However, it is impractical to directly integrate the semantic metric into the traditional codecs since they cannot be optimized in an end-to-end manner. To solve this problem, some pioneering works have applied reinforcement learning to implement image-wise semantic compression. Nevertheless, video semantic compression has not been explored since its com…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Netflix Inc.（奈飞公司）
Block based motion estimation is integral to inter prediction processes performed in hybrid video codecs. Prevalent block matching based methods that are used to compute block motion vectors (MVs) rely on computationally intensive search procedures. They also suffer from the aperture problem, which can worsen as the block size is reduced. Moreover, the block matching criteria used in typical codecs do not account for the resulting levels of perceptual quality of the motion compensated pictures that are created upon decoding. Towards achieving the elusive goal of perceptually optimized motion e…
With the growing data consumption of emerging video applications and users requirement for higher resolutions, up to 8K, a huge effort has been made in video compression technologies. Recently, versatile video coding (VVC) has been standardized by the moving picture expert group (MPEG), providing a significant improvement in compression performance over its predecessor high efficiency video coding (HEVC). In this paper, we provide a comparative subjective quality evaluation between VVC and HEVC standards for 8K resolution videos. In addition, we evaluate the perceived quality improvement offer…
The edge computing paradigm places compute-capable devices - edge servers - at the network edge to assist mobile devices in executing data analysis tasks. Intuitively, offloading compute-intense tasks to edge servers can reduce their execution time. However, poor conditions of the wireless channel connecting the mobile devices to the edge servers may degrade the overall capture-to-output delay achieved by edge offloading. Herein, we focus on edge computing supporting remote object detection by means of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), and develop a framework to reduce the amount of data transmitte…
The block-based coding structure in the hybrid video coding framework inevitably introduces compression artifacts such as blocking, ringing, etc. To compensate for those artifacts, extensive filtering techniques were proposed in the loop of video codecs, which are capable of boosting the subjective and objective qualities of reconstructed videos. Recently, neural network based filters were presented with the power of deep learning from a large magnitude of data. Though the coding efficiency has been improved from traditional methods in High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), the rich features and…
Given recent advances in learned video prediction, we investigate whether a simple video codec using a pre-trained deep model for next frame prediction based on previously encoded/decoded frames without sending any motion side information can compete with standard video codecs based on block-motion compensation. Frame differences given learned frame predictions are encoded by a standard still-image (intra) codec. Experimental results show that the rate-distortion performance of the simple codec with symmetric complexity is on average better than that of x264 codec on 10 MPEG test videos, but d…
The identification of out-of-distribution data is vital to the deployment of classification networks. For example, a generic neural network that has been trained to differentiate between images of dogs and cats can only classify an input as either a dog or a cat. If a picture of a car or a kumquat were to be supplied to this classifier, the result would still be either a dog or a cat. In order to mitigate this, techniques such as the neural network watchdog have been developed. The compression of the image input into the latent layer of the autoencoder defines the region of in-distribution in …
The past decade has witnessed great success of deep learning technology in many disciplines, especially in computer vision and image processing. However, deep learning-based video coding remains in its infancy. This paper reviews the representative works about using deep learning for image/video coding, which has been an actively developing research area since the year of 2015. We divide the related works into two categories: new coding schemes that are built primarily upon deep networks (deep schemes), and deep network-based coding tools (deep tools) that shall be used within traditional codi…
Motion compensated prediction is central to the efficiency of video compression. Its predictive coding scheme propagates the quantization distortion through the prediction chain and creates a temporal dependency. Prior research typically models the distortion propagation based on the similarity between original pixels under the assumption of high resolution quantization. Its efficacy in the low to medium bit-rate range, where the quantization step size is largely comparable to the magnitude of the residual signals, is questionable. This work proposes a quantitative approach to estimating the t…
The Sample Adaptive Offset (SAO) filter has been introduced in HEVC to reduce general coding and banding artefacts in the reconstructed pictures, in complement to the De-Blocking Filter (DBF) which reduces artifacts at block boundaries specifically. The new video compression standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC) reduces the BD-rate by about 36% at the same reconstruction quality compared to HEVC. It implements an additional new in-loop Adaptive Loop Filter (ALF) on top of the DBF and the SAO filter, the latter remaining unchanged compared to HEVC. However, the relative performance of SAO in VV…
