Learned Video Compression

Oren Rippel, Sanjay Nair, Carissa Lew, Steve Branson, Alexander G. Anderson, Lubomir Bourdev; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 3454-3463

Abstract


We present a new algorithm for video coding, learned end-to-end for the low-latency mode. In this setting, our approach outperforms all existing video codecs across nearly the entire bitrate range. To our knowledge, this is the first ML-based method to do so. We evaluate our approach on standard video compression test sets of varying resolutions, and benchmark against all mainstream commercial codecs in the low-latency mode. On standard-definition videos, HEVC/H.265, AVC/H.264 and VP9 typically produce codes up to 60% larger than our algorithm. On high-definition 1080p videos, H.265 and VP9 typically produce codes up to 20% larger, and H.264 up to 35% larger. Furthermore, our approach does not suffer from blocking artifacts and pixelation, and thus produces videos that are more visually pleasing. We propose two main contributions. The first is a novel architecture for video compression, which (1) generalizes motion estimation to perform any learned compensation beyond simple translations, (2) rather than strictly relying on previously transmitted reference frames, maintains a state of arbitrary information learned by the model, and (3) enables jointly compressing all transmitted signals (such as optical flow and residual). Secondly, we present a framework for ML-based spatial rate control --- a mechanism for assigning variable bitrates across space for each frame. This is a critical component for video coding, which to our knowledge had not been developed within a machine learning setting.

Related Material


[pdf] [supp]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Rippel_2019_ICCV,
author = {Rippel, Oren and Nair, Sanjay and Lew, Carissa and Branson, Steve and Anderson, Alexander G. and Bourdev, Lubomir},
title = {Learned Video Compression},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
month = {October},
year = {2019}
}