Learning-Based Video Coding with Joint Deep Compression and Enhancement

Abstract

End-to-end learning-based video coding has attracted substantial attentions by compressing video signals as stacked visual features. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep video codec with jointly optimized compression and enhancement modules (JCEVC). First, we propose a dual-path generative adversarial network (DPEG) to reconstruct video details after compression. An α-path and a β-path concurrently reconstruct the structure information and local textures. Second, we reuse the DPEG network in both motion compensation and quality enhancement modules, which are further combined with other necessary modules to formulate our JCEVC framework. Third, we employ a joint training of deep video compression and enhancement that further improves the rate-distortion (RD) performance of compression. Compared with x265 LDP very fast mode, our JCEVC reduces the average bit-per-pixel (bpp) by 39.39%/54.92% at the same PSNR/MS-SSIM, which outperforms the state-of-the-art deep video codecs by a considerable margin. Sourcecode is available at: https://github.com/fwz1021/JCEVC.