Adversarial Distortion for Learned Video Compression

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel adversarial lossy video compression model. At extremely low bit-rates, standard video coding schemes suffer from unpleasant reconstruction artifacts such as blocking, ringing etc. Existing learned neural approaches to video compression have achieved reasonable success on reducing the bit-rate for efficient transmission and reduce the impact of artifacts to an extent. However, they still tend to produce blurred results under extreme compression. In this paper, we present a deep adversarial learned video compression model that minimizes an auxiliary adversarial distortion objective. We find this adversarial objective to correlate better with human perceptual quality judgement relative to traditional quality metrics such as MS-SSIM and PSNR. Our experiments using a state-of-the-art learned video compression system demonstrate a reduction of perceptual artifacts and reconstruction of detail lost especially under extremely high compression.