In plain words: This video compressor invents fine detail from the previous decoded frame, then moves it across frames with accurate motion. Viewers rated its pictures better than earlier neural and standard codecs, though standard quality scores failed to match those ratings.
Abstract · Neural Video Compression using GANs for Detail Synthesis and Propagation
We present the first neural video compression method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). Our approach significantly outperforms previous neural and non-neural video compression methods in a user study, setting a new state-of-the-art in visual quality for neural methods. We show that the GAN loss is crucial to obtain this high visual quality. Two components make the GAN loss effective: we i) synthesize detail by conditioning the generator on a latent extracted from the warped previous reconstruction to then ii) propagate this detail with high-quality flow. We find that user studies are required to compare methods, i.e., none of our quantitative metrics were able to predict all studies. We present the network design choices in detail, and ablate them with user studies.
Fabian Mentzer, Eirikur Agustsson, Johannes Ballé, David Minnen, Nick Johnston, George Toderici
arXiv:2107.12038 · eess.IV, cs.CV · submitted Jul 26, 2021 · updated Jul 12, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · First two authors contributed equally. ECCV Camera ready version