DVC-P: Deep Video Compression with Perceptual Optimizations

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the significant development of learning-based video compression methods, which aim at optimizing objective or perceptual quality and bit rates. In this paper, we introduce deep video compression with perceptual optimizations (DVC-P), which aims at increasing perceptual quality of decoded videos. Our proposed DVC-P is based on Deep Video Compression (DVC) network, but improves it with perceptual optimizations. Specifically, a discriminator network and a mixed loss are employed to help our network trade off among distortion, perception and rate. Furthermore, nearest-neighbor interpolation is used to eliminate checkerboard artifacts which can appear in sequences encoded with DVC frameworks. Thanks to these two improvements, the perceptual quality of decoded sequences is improved. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the baseline DVC, our proposed method can generate videos with higher perceptual quality achieving 12.27% reduction in a perceptual BD-rate equivalent, on average.