In plain words: Frames are compressed twice: a standard codec plus soft edge maps, and a neural decoder rebuilds them from maps instead of interpolating between keyframes. It trains on a few frames from one video and beats H.264 and HEVC on picture quality at low bitrates.
Abstract
We propose a video compression framework using conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We rely on two encoders: one that deploys a standard video codec and another which generates low-level maps via a pipeline of down-sampling, a newly devised soft edge detector, and a novel lossless compression scheme. For decoding, we use a standard video decoder as well as a neural network based one, which is trained using a conditional GAN. Recent "deep" approaches to video compression require multiple videos to pre-train generative networks to conduct interpolation. In contrast to this prior work, our scheme trains a generative decoder on pairs of a very limited number of key frames taken from a single video and corresponding low-level maps. The trained decoder produces reconstructed frames relying on a guidance of low-level maps, without any interpolation. Experiments on a diverse set of 131 videos demonstrate that our proposed GAN-based compression engine achieves much higher quality reconstructions at very low bitrates than prevailing standard codecs such as H.264 or HEVC.
Sungsoo Kim, Jin Soo Park, Christos G. Bampis, Jaeseong Lee, Mia K. Markey, Alexandros G. Dimakis, Alan C. Bovik
arXiv:1811.10673 · eess.IV, cs.CV · submitted Nov 26, 2018
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