Video quality assessment (VQA) is a crucial task in the development of video compression standards, as it directly impacts the viewer experience. This paper presents the results of the Compressed Video Quality Assessment challenge, held in conjunction with the Advances in Image Manipulation (AIM) workshop at ECCV 2024. The challenge aimed to evaluate the performance of VQA methods on a diverse dataset of 459 videos, encoded with 14 codecs of various compression standards (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, AV1, and VVC/H.266) and containing a comprehensive collection of compression artifacts. To measure the methods performance, we employed traditional correlation coefficients between their predictions and subjective scores, which were collected via large-scale crowdsourced pairwise human comparisons. For training purposes, participants were provided with the Compressed Video Quality Assessment Dataset (CVQAD), a previously developed dataset of 1022 videos. Up to 30 participating teams registered for the challenge, while we report the results of 6 teams, which submitted valid final solutions and code for reproducing the results. Moreover, we calculated and present the performance of state-of-the-art VQA methods on the developed dataset, providing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. The dataset, results, and online leaderboard are publicly available at https://challenges.videoprocessing.ai/challenges/compressedvideo-quality-assessment.html.
Deep video compression has made remarkable process in recent years, with the majority of advancements concentrated on P-frame coding. Although efforts to enhance B-frame coding are ongoing, their compression performance is still far behind that of traditional bi-directional video codecs. In this paper, we introduce a bi-directional deep contextual video compression scheme tailored for B-frames, termed DCVC-B, to improve the compression performance of deep B-frame coding. Our scheme mainly has three key innovations. First, we develop a bi-directional motion difference context propagation method for effective motion difference coding, which significantly reduces the bit cost of bi-directional motions. Second, we propose a bi-directional contextual compression model and a corresponding bi-directional temporal entropy model, to make better use of the multi-scale temporal contexts. Third, we propose a hierarchical quality structure-based training strategy, leading to an effective bit allocation across large groups of pictures (GOP). Experimental results show that our DCVC-B achieves an average reduction of 26.6% in BD-Rate compared to the reference software for H.265/HEVC under random access conditions. Remarkably, it surpasses the performance of the H.266/VVC reference software on certain test datasets under the same configuration. We anticipate our work can provide valuable insights and bring up deep B-frame coding to the next level.
Existing codecs are designed to eliminate intrinsic redundancies to create a compact representation for compression. However, strong external priors from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have not been explicitly explored in video compression. Herein, we introduce a unified paradigm for Cross-Modality Video Coding (CMVC), which is a pioneering approach to explore multimodality representation and video generative models in video coding. Specifically, on the encoder side, we disentangle a video into spatial content and motion components, which are subsequently transformed into distinct modalities to achieve very compact representation by leveraging MLLMs. During decoding, previously encoded components and video generation models are leveraged to create multiple encoding-decoding modes that optimize video reconstruction quality for specific decoding requirements, including Text-Text-to-Video (TT2V) mode to ensure high-quality semantic information and Image-Text-to-Video (IT2V) mode to achieve superb perceptual consistency. In addition, we propose an efficient frame interpolation model for IT2V mode via Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) tuning to guarantee perceptual quality, which allows the generated motion cues to behave smoothly. Experiments on benchmarks indicate that TT2V achieves effective semantic reconstruction, while IT2V exhibits competitive perceptual consistency. These results highlight potential directions for future research in video coding.
We study the visual quality judgments of human subjects on digital human avatars (sometimes referred to as "holograms" in the parlance of virtual reality [VR] and augmented reality [AR] systems) that have been subjected to distortions. We also study the ability of video quality models to predict human judgments. As streaming human avatar videos in VR or AR become increasingly common, the need for more advanced human avatar video compression protocols will be required to address the tradeoffs between faithfully transmitting high-quality visual representations while adjusting to changeable bandwidth scenarios. During transmission over the internet, the perceived quality of compressed human avatar videos can be severely impaired by visual artifacts. To optimize trade-offs between perceptual quality and data volume in practical workflows, video quality assessment (VQA) models are essential tools. However, there are very few VQA algorithms developed specifically to analyze human body avatar videos, due, at least in part, to the dearth of appropriate and comprehensive datasets of adequate size. Towards filling this gap, we introduce the LIVE-Meta Rendered Human Avatar VQA Database, which contains 720 human avatar videos processed using 20 different combinations of encoding parameters, labeled by corresponding human perceptual quality judgments that were collected in six degrees of freedom VR headsets. To demonstrate the usefulness of this new and unique video resource, we use it to study and compare the performances of a variety of state-of-the-art Full Reference and No Reference video quality prediction models, including a new model called HoloQA. As a service to the research community, we publicly releases the metadata of the new database at https://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVE-Meta-rendered-human-avatar/index.html.
Recent advances in video compression have seen significant coding performance improvements with the development of new standards and learning-based video codecs. However, most of these works focus on application scenarios that allow a certain amount of system delay (e.g., Random Access mode in MPEG codecs), which is not always acceptable for live delivery. This paper conducts a comparative study of state-of-the-art conventional and learned video coding methods based on a low delay configuration. Specifically, this study includes two MPEG standard codecs (H.266/VVC VTM and JVET ECM), two AOM codecs (AV1 libaom and AVM), and two recent neural video coding models (DCVC-DC and DCVC-FM). To allow a fair and meaningful comparison, the evaluation was performed on test sequences defined in the AOM and MPEG common test conditions in the YCbCr 4:2:0 color space. The evaluation results show that the JVET ECM codecs offer the best overall coding performance among all codecs tested, with a 16.1% (based on PSNR) average BD-rate saving over AOM AVM, and 11.0% over DCVC-FM. We also observed inconsistent performance with the learned video codecs, DCVC-DC and DCVC-FM, for test content with large background motions.
Deep learning is now playing an important role in enhancing the performance of conventional hybrid video codecs. These learning-based methods typically require diverse and representative training material for optimization in order to achieve model generalization and optimal coding performance. However, existing datasets either offer limited content variability or come with restricted licensing terms constraining their use to research purposes only. To address these issues, we propose a new training dataset, named BVI-AOM, which contains 956 uncompressed sequences at various resolutions from 270p to 2160p, covering a wide range of content and texture types. The dataset comes with more flexible licensing terms and offers competitive performance when used as a training set for optimizing deep video coding tools. The experimental results demonstrate that when used as a training set to optimize two popular network architectures for two different coding tools, the proposed dataset leads to additional bitrate savings of up to 0.29 and 2.98 percentage points in terms of PSNR-Y and VMAF, respectively, compared to an existing training dataset, BVI-DVC, which has been widely used for deep video coding. The BVI-AOM dataset is available at https://github.com/fan-aaron-zhang/bvi-aom
What the human visual system can perceive is strongly limited by the capacity of our working memory and attention. Such limitations result in the human observer's inability to perceive large-scale changes in a stimulus, a phenomenon known as change blindness. In this paper, we started with the premise that this phenomenon can be exploited in video coding, especially HDR-video compression where the bitrate is high. We designed an HDR-video encoding approach that relies on spatially and temporally varying quantization parameters within the framework of HEVC video encoding. In the absence of a reliable change blindness prediction model, to extract compression candidate regions (CCR) we used an existing saliency prediction algorithm. We explored different configurations and carried out a subjective study to test our hypothesis. While our methodology did not lead to significantly superior performance in terms of the ratio between perceived quality and bitrate, we were able to determine potential flaws in our methodology, such as the employed saliency model for CCR prediction (chosen for computational efficiency, but eventually not sufficiently accurate), as well as a very strong subjective bias due to observers priming themselves early on in the experiment about the type of artifacts they should look for, thus creating a scenario with little ecological validity.
Recent advancements in Diffusion Transformer (DiT) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in producing high-quality video content. Nonetheless, the potential of transformer-based diffusion models for effectively generating videos with controllable motion remains an area of limited exploration. This paper introduces Tora, the first trajectory-oriented DiT framework that concurrently integrates textual, visual, and trajectory conditions, thereby enabling scalable video generation with effective motion guidance. Specifically, Tora consists of a Trajectory Extractor(TE), a Spatial-Temporal DiT, and a Motion-guidance Fuser(MGF). The TE encodes arbitrary trajectories into hierarchical spacetime motion patches with a 3D video compression network. The MGF integrates the motion patches into the DiT blocks to generate consistent videos that accurately follow designated trajectories. Our design aligns seamlessly with DiT's scalability, allowing precise control of video content's dynamics with diverse durations, aspect ratios, and resolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate Tora's excellence in achieving high motion fidelity, while also meticulously simulating the intricate movement of the physical world. Code is available at: https://github.com/alibaba/Tora.
The emerging large models have achieved notable progress in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision. However, large models for neural video coding are still unexplored. In this paper, we try to explore how to build a large neural video coding model. Based on a small baseline model, we gradually scale up the model sizes of its different coding parts, including the motion encoder-decoder, motion entropy model, contextual encoder-decoder, contextual entropy model, and temporal context mining module, and analyze the influence of model sizes on video compression performance. Then, we explore to use different architectures, including CNN, mixed CNN-Transformer, and Transformer architectures, to implement the neural video coding model and analyze the influence of model architectures on video compression performance. Based on our exploration results, we design the first neural video coding model with more than 1 billion parameters -- NVC-1B. Experimental results show that our proposed large model achieves a significant video compression performance improvement over the small baseline model, and represents the state-of-the-art compression efficiency. We anticipate large models may bring up the video coding technologies to the next level.
In recent years, the field of learned video compression has witnessed rapid advancement, exemplified by the latest neural video codecs DCVC-DC that has outperformed the upcoming next-generation codec ECM in terms of compression ratio. Despite this, learned video compression frameworks often exhibit low encoding and decoding speeds primarily due to their increased computational complexity and unnecessary high-resolution spatial operations, which hugely hinder their applications in reality. In this work, we introduce an efficiency-optimized framework for learned video compression that focuses on low-resolution representation learning, aiming to significantly enhance the encoding and decoding speeds. Firstly, we diminish the computational load by reducing the resolution of inter-frame propagated features obtained from reused features of decoded frames, including I-frames. We implement a joint training strategy for both the I-frame and P-frame models, further improving the compression ratio. Secondly, our approach efficiently leverages multi-frame priors for parameter prediction, minimizing computation at the decoding end. Thirdly, we revisit the application of the Online Encoder Update (OEU) strategy for high-resolution sequences, achieving notable improvements in compression ratio without compromising decoding efficiency. Our efficiency-optimized framework has significantly improved the balance between compression ratio and speed for learned video compression. In comparison to traditional codecs, our method achieves performance levels on par with the low-decay P configuration of the H.266 reference software VTM. Furthermore, when contrasted with DCVC-HEM, our approach delivers a comparable compression ratio while boosting encoding and decoding speeds by a factor of 3 and 7, respectively. On RTX 2080Ti, our method can decode each 1080p frame under 100ms.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission collects extensive data to monitor the Sun's daily activity. In the realm of space mission design, data compression plays a crucial role in addressing the challenges posed by limited telemetry rates. The primary objective of data compression is to facilitate efficient data management and transmission to work within the constrained bandwidth, thereby ensuring that essential information is captured while optimizing the utilization of available resources. This paper introduces a neural video compression technique that achieves a high compression ratio for the SDO's image data collection. The proposed approach focuses on leveraging both temporal and spatial redundancies in the data, leading to a more efficient compression. In this work, we introduce an architecture based on the Transformer model, which is specifically designed to capture both local and global information from input images in an effective and efficient manner. Additionally, our network is equipped with an entropy model that can accurately model the probability distribution of the latent representations and improves the speed of the entropy decoding step. The entropy model leverages a channel-dependent approach and utilizes checkerboard-shaped local and global spatial contexts. By combining the Transformer-based video compression network with our entropy model, the proposed compression algorithm demonstrates superior performance over traditional video codecs like H.264 and H.265, as confirmed by our experimental results.
With the rapid growth of User-Generated Content (UGC) exchanged between users and sharing platforms, the need for video quality assessment in the wild is increasingly evident. UGC is typically acquired using consumer devices and undergoes multiple rounds of compression (transcoding) before reaching the end user. Therefore, traditional quality metrics that employ the original content as a reference are not suitable. In this paper, we propose ReLaX-VQA, a novel No-Reference Video Quality Assessment (NR-VQA) model that aims to address the challenges of evaluating the quality of diverse video content without reference to the original uncompressed videos. ReLaX-VQA uses frame differences to select spatio-temporal fragments intelligently together with different expressions of spatial features associated with the sampled frames. These are then used to better capture spatial and temporal variabilities in the quality of neighbouring frames. Furthermore, the model enhances abstraction by employing layer-stacking techniques in deep neural network features from Residual Networks and Vision Transformers. Extensive testing across four UGC datasets demonstrates that ReLaX-VQA consistently outperforms existing NR-VQA methods, achieving an average SRCC of 0.8658 and PLCC of 0.8873. Open-source code and trained models that will facilitate further research and applications of NR-VQA can be found at https://github.com/xinyiW915/ReLaX-VQA.
With the rapid advancement of stereo vision technologies, stereo image compression has emerged as a crucial field that continues to draw significant attention. Previous approaches have primarily employed a unidirectional paradigm, where the compression of one view is dependent on the other, resulting in imbalanced compression. To address this issue, we introduce a symmetric bidirectional stereo image compression architecture, named BiSIC. Specifically, we propose a 3D convolution based codec backbone to capture local features and incorporate bidirectional attention blocks to exploit global features. Moreover, we design a novel cross-dimensional entropy model that integrates various conditioning factors, including the spatial context, channel context, and stereo dependency, to effectively estimate the distribution of latent representations for entropy coding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed BiSIC outperforms conventional image/video compression standards, as well as state-of-the-art learning-based methods, in terms of both PSNR and MS-SSIM.
Video Synopsis is a technique that performs video compression in a way that preserves the activity in the video. This technique is particularly useful in surveillance and monitoring applications. Although it is still a nascent field of research, there have been several approaches proposed over the last two decades varying with the application, optimization type, nature of data feed, etc. The primary data required for these algorithms arises from some sort of object tracking method. In this paper, we discuss different spatio-temporal data representations suitable for different applications. We also present a formal definition for the video synopsis algorithm. We further discuss the assumptions and modifications to this definition required for a simpler version of the problem. We explore the application of a packing algorithm to solve the problem of video synopsis. Since the nature of the data is three dimensional, we consider 3D packing problems in the discussion. This paper also provides an extensive literature review of different video synopsis methods and packing problems. Lastly, we examine the different applications of this algorithm and how the different data representations discussed earlier can make the problem simpler. We also discuss the future directions of research that can be explored following this discussion.
As a novel video representation method, Neural Representations for Videos (NeRV) has shown great potential in the fields of video compression, video restoration, and video interpolation. In the process of representing videos using NeRV, each frame corresponds to an embedding, which is then reconstructed into a video frame sequence after passing through a small number of decoding layers (E-NeRV, HNeRV, etc.). However, this small number of decoding layers can easily lead to the problem of redundant model parameters due to the large proportion of parameters in a single decoding layer, which greatly restricts the video regression ability of neural network models. In this paper, we propose a multilayer neural representation for videos (MNeRV) and design a new decoder M-Decoder and its matching encoder M-Encoder. MNeRV has more encoding and decoding layers, which effectively alleviates the problem of redundant model parameters caused by too few layers. In addition, we design MNeRV blocks to perform more uniform and effective parameter allocation between decoding layers. In the field of video regression reconstruction, we achieve better reconstruction quality (+4.06 PSNR) with fewer parameters. Finally, we showcase MNeRV performance in downstream tasks such as video restoration and video interpolation. The source code of MNeRV is available at https://github.com/Aaronbtb/MNeRV.
Video compression technology is essential for transmitting and storing videos. Many video compression methods reduce information in videos by removing high-frequency components and utilizing similarities between frames. Alternatively, the implicit neural representations (INRs) for videos, which use networks to represent and compress videos through model compression. A conventional method improves the quality of reconstruction by using frame features. However, the detailed representation of the frames can be improved. To improve the quality of reconstructed frames, we propose a method that uses low-resolution frames as residual connection that is considered effective for image reconstruction. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the existing method, HNeRV, in PSNR for 46 of the 49 videos.
The Video comprises approximately ~85\% of all internet traffic, but video encoding/compression is being historically done with hard coded rules, which has worked well but only to a certain limit. We have seen a surge in video compression algorithms using ML-based models in the last few years and many of them have outperformed several legacy codecs. The models range from encoding video end to end using an ML approach or replacing some intermediate steps in legacy codecs using ML models to increase the efficiency of those steps. Optimizing video storage is an essential aspect of video processing, so we are proposing one of the possible approaches to achieve it is by avoiding redundant data at each frame. In this paper, we want to introduce the approach of redundancies removal in subsequent frames for a given video as a main approach for video compression. We call this method Redundancy Removal using Shift (R\textsuperscript2S). This method can be utilized across various Machine Learning model algorithms, and make the compression more accessible and adaptable. In this study, we have utilized a computer vision-based pixel point tracking method to identify redundant pixels to encode video for optimal storage.
Learned video compression methods already outperform VVC in the low-delay (LD) case, but the random-access (RA) scenario remains challenging. Most works on learned RA video compression either use HEVC as an anchor or compare it to VVC in specific test conditions, using RGB-PSNR metric instead of Y-PSNR and avoiding comprehensive evaluation. Here, we present an end-to-end learned video codec for random access that combines training on long sequences of frames, rate allocation designed for hierarchical coding and content adaptation on inference. We show that under common test conditions (JVET-CTC), it achieves results comparable to VTM (VVC reference software) in terms of YUV-PSNR BD-Rate on some classes of videos, and outperforms it on almost all test sets in terms of VMAF BD-Rate. On average it surpasses open LD and RA end-to-end solutions in terms of VMAF and YUV BD-Rates.
Temporal prediction is one of the most important technologies for video compression. Various prediction coding modes are designed in traditional video codecs. Traditional video codecs will adaptively to decide the optimal coding mode according to the prediction quality and reference quality. Recently, learned video codecs have made great progress. However, they did not effectively address the problem of prediction and reference quality adaptation, which limits the effective utilization of temporal prediction and reduction of reconstruction error propagation. Therefore, in this paper, we first propose a confidence-based prediction quality adaptation (PQA) module to provide explicit discrimination for the spatial and channel-wise prediction quality difference. With this module, the prediction with low quality will be suppressed and that with high quality will be enhanced. The codec can adaptively decide which spatial or channel location of predictions to use. Then, we further propose a reference quality adaptation (RQA) module and an associated repeat-long training strategy to provide dynamic spatially variant filters for diverse reference qualities. With these filters, our codec can adapt to different reference qualities, making it easier to achieve the target reconstruction quality and reduce the reconstruction error propagation. Experimental results verify that our proposed modules can effectively help our codec achieve a higher compression performance.
Recently, Neural Video Compression (NVC) techniques have achieved remarkable performance, even surpassing the best traditional lossy video codec. However, most existing NVC methods heavily rely on transmitting Motion Vector (MV) to generate accurate contextual features, which has the following drawbacks. (1) Compressing and transmitting MV requires specialized MV encoder and decoder, which makes modules redundant. (2) Due to the existence of MV Encoder-Decoder, the training strategy is complex. In this paper, we present a noval Single Stream NVC framework (SSNVC), which removes complex MV Encoder-Decoder structure and uses a one-stage training strategy. SSNVC implicitly use temporal information by adding previous entropy model feature to current entropy model and using previous two frame to generate predicted motion information at the decoder side. Besides, we enhance the frame generator to generate higher quality reconstructed frame. Experiments demonstrate that SSNVC can achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, and can greatly simplify compression process as well as training process.