Zhan Ma

Zhihao Duan, Ming Lu, Zhan Ma et al.

Recent research has shown a strong theoretical connection between variational autoencoders (VAEs) and the rate-distortion theory. Motivated by this, we consider the problem of lossy image compression from the perspective of generative modeling. Starting with ResNet VAEs, which are originally designed for data (image) distribution modeling, we redesign their latent variable model using a quantization-aware posterior and prior, enabling easy quantization and entropy coding at test time. Along with improved neural network architecture, we present a powerful and efficient model that outperforms previous methods on natural image lossy compression. Our model compresses images in a coarse-to-fine fashion and supports parallel encoding and decoding, leading to fast execution on GPUs. Code is available at https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vae.

Xu Zhang, Peiyao Guo, Ming Lu et al.

Image coding for multi-task applications, catering to both human perception and machine vision, has been extensively investigated. Existing methods often rely on multiple task-specific encoder-decoder pairs, leading to high overhead of parameter and bitrate usage, or face challenges in multi-objective optimization under a unified representation, failing to achieve both performance and efficiency. To this end, we propose Multi-Path Aggregation (MPA) integrated into existing coding models for joint human-machine vision, unifying the feature representation with an all-in-one architecture. MPA employs a predictor to allocate latent features among task-specific paths based on feature importance varied across tasks, maximizing the utility of shared features while preserving task-specific features for subsequent refinement. Leveraging feature correlations, we develop a two-stage optimization strategy to alleviate multi-task performance degradation. Upon the reuse of shared features, as low as 1.89% parameters are further augmented and fine-tuned for a specific task, which completely avoids extensive optimization of the entire model. Experimental results show that MPA achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods in both task-specific and multi-objective optimization across human viewing and machine analysis tasks. Moreover, our all-in-one design supports seamless transitions between human- and machine-oriented reconstruction, enabling task-controllable interpretation without altering the unified model. Code is available at https://github.com/NJUVISION/MPA.

Hao Zhu, Fengyi Liu, Qi Zhang et al.

The use of Implicit Neural Representation (INR) through a hash-table has demonstrated impressive effectiveness and efficiency in characterizing intricate signals. However, current state-of-the-art methods exhibit insufficient regularization, often yielding unreliable and noisy results during interpolations. We find that this issue stems from broken gradient flow between input coordinates and indexed hash-keys, where the chain rule attempts to model discrete hash-keys, rather than the continuous coordinates. To tackle this concern, we introduce RHINO, in which a continuous analytical function is incorporated to facilitate regularization by connecting the input coordinate and the network additionally without modifying the architecture of current hash-based INRs. This connection ensures a seamless backpropagation of gradients from the network's output back to the input coordinates, thereby enhancing regularization. Our experimental results not only showcase the broadened regularization capability across different hash-based INRs like DINER and Instant NGP, but also across a variety of tasks such as image fitting, representation of signed distance functions, and optimization of 5D static / 6D dynamic neural radiance fields. Notably, RHINO outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques in both quality and speed, affirming its superiority.

Qi Zhao, M. Salman Asif, Zhan Ma

Existing implicit neural representation (INR) methods do not fully exploit spatiotemporal redundancies in videos. Index-based INRs ignore the content-specific spatial features and hybrid INRs ignore the contextual dependency on adjacent frames, leading to poor modeling capability for scenes with large motion or dynamics. We analyze this limitation from the perspective of function fitting and reveal the importance of frame difference. To use explicit motion information, we propose Difference Neural Representation for Videos (DNeRV), which consists of two streams for content and frame difference. We also introduce a collaborative content unit for effective feature fusion. We test DNeRV for video compression, inpainting, and interpolation. DNeRV achieves competitive results against the state-of-the-art neural compression approaches and outperforms existing implicit methods on downstream inpainting and interpolation for $960 \times 1920$ videos.

Zhihao Li, Ming Lu, Xu Zhang et al.

Conventional cameras capture image irradiance on a sensor and convert it to RGB images using an image signal processor (ISP). The images can then be used for photography or visual computing tasks in a variety of applications, such as public safety surveillance and autonomous driving. One can argue that since RAW images contain all the captured information, the conversion of RAW to RGB using an ISP is not necessary for visual computing. In this paper, we propose a novel $ρ$-Vision framework to perform high-level semantic understanding and low-level compression using RAW images without the ISP subsystem used for decades. Considering the scarcity of available RAW image datasets, we first develop an unpaired CycleR2R network based on unsupervised CycleGAN to train modular unrolled ISP and inverse ISP (invISP) models using unpaired RAW and RGB images. We can then flexibly generate simulated RAW images (simRAW) using any existing RGB image dataset and finetune different models originally trained for the RGB domain to process real-world camera RAW images. We demonstrate object detection and image compression capabilities in RAW-domain using RAW-domain YOLOv3 and RAW image compressor (RIC) on snapshots from various cameras. Quantitative results reveal that RAW-domain task inference provides better detection accuracy and compression compared to RGB-domain processing. Furthermore, the proposed \r{ho}-Vision generalizes across various camera sensors and different task-specific models. Additional advantages of the proposed $ρ$-Vision that eliminates the ISP are the potential reductions in computations and processing times.

Hao Zhu, Shaowen Xie, Zhen Liu et al.

Implicit neural representation (INR) characterizes the attributes of a signal as a function of corresponding coordinates which emerges as a sharp weapon for solving inverse problems. However, the expressive power of INR is limited by the spectral bias in the network training. In this paper, we find that such a frequency-related problem could be greatly solved by re-arranging the coordinates of the input signal, for which we propose the disorder-invariant implicit neural representation (DINER) by augmenting a hash-table to a traditional INR backbone. Given discrete signals sharing the same histogram of attributes and different arrangement orders, the hash-table could project the coordinates into the same distribution for which the mapped signal can be better modeled using the subsequent INR network, leading to significantly alleviated spectral bias. Furthermore, the expressive power of the DINER is determined by the width of the hash-table. Different width corresponds to different geometrical elements in the attribute space, \textit{e.g.}, 1D curve, 2D curved-plane and 3D curved-volume when the width is set as $1$, $2$ and $3$, respectively. More covered areas of the geometrical elements result in stronger expressive power. Experiments not only reveal the generalization of the DINER for different INR backbones (MLP vs. SIREN) and various tasks (image/video representation, phase retrieval, refractive index recovery, and neural radiance field optimization) but also show the superiority over the state-of-the-art algorithms both in quality and speed. \textit{Project page:} \url{https://ezio77.github.io/DINER-website/}

Shaowen Xie, Hao Zhu, Zhen Liu et al.

Implicit neural representation (INR) characterizes the attributes of a signal as a function of corresponding coordinates which emerges as a sharp weapon for solving inverse problems. However, the capacity of INR is limited by the spectral bias in the network training. In this paper, we find that such a frequency-related problem could be largely solved by re-arranging the coordinates of the input signal, for which we propose the disorder-invariant implicit neural representation (DINER) by augmenting a hash-table to a traditional INR backbone. Given discrete signals sharing the same histogram of attributes and different arrangement orders, the hash-table could project the coordinates into the same distribution for which the mapped signal can be better modeled using the subsequent INR network, leading to significantly alleviated spectral bias. Experiments not only reveal the generalization of the DINER for different INR backbones (MLP vs. SIREN) and various tasks (image/video representation, phase retrieval, and refractive index recovery) but also show the superiority over the state-of-the-art algorithms both in quality and speed.

Ming Cheng, Yiling Xu, Wang Shen et al.

High-speed, high-resolution stereoscopic (H2-Stereo) video allows us to perceive dynamic 3D content at fine granularity. The acquisition of H2-Stereo video, however, remains challenging with commodity cameras. Existing spatial super-resolution or temporal frame interpolation methods provide compromised solutions that lack temporal or spatial details, respectively. To alleviate this problem, we propose a dual camera system, in which one camera captures high-spatial-resolution low-frame-rate (HSR-LFR) videos with rich spatial details, and the other captures low-spatial-resolution high-frame-rate (LSR-HFR) videos with smooth temporal details. We then devise a Learned Information Fusion network (LIFnet) that exploits the cross-camera redundancies to enhance both camera views to high spatiotemporal resolution (HSTR) for reconstructing the H2-Stereo video effectively. We utilize a disparity network to transfer spatiotemporal information across views even in large disparity scenes, based on which, we propose disparity-guided flow-based warping for LSR-HFR view and complementary warping for HSR-LFR view. A multi-scale fusion method in feature domain is proposed to minimize occlusion-induced warping ghosts and holes in HSR-LFR view. The LIFnet is trained in an end-to-end manner using our collected high-quality Stereo Video dataset from YouTube. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for both views on synthetic data and camera-captured real data with large disparity. Ablation studies explore various aspects, including spatiotemporal resolution, camera baseline, camera desynchronization, long/short exposures and applications, of our system to fully understand its capability for potential applications.

Bin Jiang, Zhihao Li, M. Salman Asif et al.

The event camera's low power consumption and ability to capture microsecond brightness changes make it attractive for various computer vision tasks. Existing event representation methods typically convert events into frames, voxel grids, or spikes for deep neural networks (DNNs). However, these approaches often sacrifice temporal granularity or require specialized devices for processing. This work introduces a novel token-based event representation, where each event is considered a fundamental processing unit termed an event-token. This approach preserves the sequence's intricate spatiotemporal attributes at the event level. Moreover, we propose a Three-way Attention mechanism in the Event Transformer Block (ETB) to collaboratively construct temporal and spatial correlations between events. We compare our proposed token-based event representation extensively with other prevalent methods for object classification and optical flow estimation. The experimental results showcase its competitive performance while demanding minimal computational resources on standard devices. Our code is publicly accessible at \url{https://github.com/NJUVISION/EventTransformer}.

Ruixiang Xue, Jianqiang Wang, Zhan Ma

Although convolutional representation of multiscale sparse tensor demonstrated its superior efficiency to accurately model the occupancy probability for the compression of geometry component of dense object point clouds, its capacity for representing sparse LiDAR point cloud geometry (PCG) was largely limited. This is because 1) fixed receptive field of the convolution cannot characterize extremely and unevenly distributed sparse LiDAR points very well; and 2) pretrained convolutions with fixed weights are insufficient to dynamically capture information conditioned on the input. This work therefore suggests the neighborhood point attention (NPA) to tackle them, where we first use k nearest neighbors (kNN) to construct adaptive local neighborhood; and then leverage the self-attention mechanism to dynamically aggregate information within this neighborhood. Such NPA is devised as a NPAFormer to best exploit cross-scale and same-scale correlations for geometric occupancy probability estimation. Compared with the anchor using standardized G-PCC, our method provides >17% BD-rate gains for lossy compression, and >14% bitrate reduction for lossless scenario using popular LiDAR point clouds in SemanticKITTI and Ford datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) solution using attention optimized octree coding method, our approach requires much less decoding runtime with about 640 times speedup on average, while still presenting better compression efficiency.

Jianqiang Wang, Dandan Ding, Hao Chen et al.

This work extends the Multiscale Sparse Representation (MSR) framework developed for static Point Cloud Geometry Compression (PCGC) to support the dynamic PCGC through the use of multiscale inter conditional coding. To this end, the reconstruction of the preceding Point Cloud Geometry (PCG) frame is progressively downscaled to generate multiscale temporal priors which are then scale-wise transferred and integrated with lower-scale spatial priors from the same frame to form the contextual information to improve occupancy probability approximation when processing the current PCG frame from one scale to another. Following the Common Test Conditions (CTC) defined in the standardization committee, the proposed method presents State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) compression performance, yielding 78% lossy BD-Rate gain to the latest standard-compliant V-PCC and 45% lossless bitrate reduction to the latest G-PCC. Even for recently-emerged learning-based solutions, our method still shows significant performance gains.

Dandan Ding, Junzhe Zhang, Jianqiang Wang et al.

A learning-based adaptive loop filter is developed for the Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) standard to reduce attribute compression artifacts. The proposed method first generates multiple Most-Probable Sample Offsets (MPSOs) as potential compression distortion approximations, and then linearly weights them for artifact mitigation. As such, we drive the filtered reconstruction as close to the uncompressed PCA as possible. To this end, we devise a Compression Artifact Reduction Network (CARNet) which consists of two consecutive processing phases: MPSOs derivation and MPSOs combination. The MPSOs derivation uses a two-stream network to model local neighborhood variations from direct spatial embedding and frequency-dependent embedding, where sparse convolutions are utilized to best aggregate information from sparsely and irregularly distributed points. The MPSOs combination is guided by the least square error metric to derive weighting coefficients on the fly to further capture content dynamics of input PCAs. The CARNet is implemented as an in-loop filtering tool of the GPCC, where those linear weighting coefficients are encapsulated into the bitstream with negligible bit rate overhead. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvement over the latest GPCC both subjectively and objectively.

Hao Zhu, Zhen Liu, Qi Zhang et al.

Implicit Neural Representation (INR), which utilizes a neural network to map coordinate inputs to corresponding attributes, is causing a revolution in the field of signal processing. However, current INR techniques suffer from the "frequency"-specified spectral bias and capacity-convergence gap, resulting in imperfect performance when representing complex signals with multiple "frequencies". We have identified that both of these two characteristics could be handled by increasing the utilization of definition domain in current activation functions, for which we propose the FINER++ framework by extending existing periodic/non-periodic activation functions to variable-periodic ones. By initializing the bias of the neural network with different ranges, sub-functions with various frequencies in the variable-periodic function are selected for activation. Consequently, the supported frequency set can be flexibly tuned, leading to improved performance in signal representation. We demonstrate the generalization and capabilities of FINER++ with different activation function backbones (Sine, Gauss. and Wavelet) and various tasks (2D image fitting, 3D signed distance field representation, 5D neural radiance fields optimization and streamable INR transmission), and we show that it improves existing INRs. Project page: {https://liuzhen0212.github.io/finerpp/}

Bowei Xu, Hao Chen, Zhan Ma

Optimal adaptive bitrate (ABR) decision depends on a comprehensive characterization of state transitions that involve interrelated modalities over time including environmental observations, returns, and actions. However, state-of-the-art learning-based ABR algorithms solely rely on past observations to decide the next action. This paradigm tends to cause a chain of deviations from optimal action when encountering unfamiliar observations, which consequently undermines the model generalization. This paper presents Karma, an ABR algorithm that utilizes causal sequence modeling to improve generalization by comprehending the interrelated causality among past observations, returns, and actions and timely refining action when deviation occurs. Unlike direct observation-to-action mapping, Karma recurrently maintains a multi-dimensional time series of observations, returns, and actions as input and employs causal sequence modeling via a decision transformer to determine the next action. In the input sequence, Karma uses the maximum cumulative future quality of experience (QoE) (a.k.a, QoE-to-go) as an extended return signal, which is periodically estimated based on current network conditions and playback status. We evaluate Karma through trace-driven simulations and real-world field tests, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art ABR algorithms, with an average QoE improvement ranging from 10.8% to 18.7% across diverse network conditions. Furthermore, Karma exhibits strong generalization capabilities, showing leading performance under unseen networks in both simulations and real-world tests.

Zhihao Li, Si Yi, Zhan Ma

Image signal processing (ISP) is crucial for camera imaging, and neural networks (NN) solutions are extensively deployed for daytime scenes. The lack of sufficient nighttime image dataset and insights on nighttime illumination characteristics poses a great challenge for high-quality rendering using existing NN ISPs. To tackle it, we first built a high-resolution nighttime RAW-RGB (NR2R) dataset with white balance and tone mapping annotated by expert professionals. Meanwhile, to best capture the characteristics of nighttime illumination light sources, we develop the CBUnet, a two-stage NN ISP to cascade the compensation of color and brightness attributes. Experiments show that our method has better visual quality compared to traditional ISP pipeline, and is ranked at the second place in the NTIRE 2022 Night Photography Rendering Challenge for two tracks by respective People's and Professional Photographer's choices. The code and relevant materials are avaiable on our website: https://njuvision.github.io/CBUnet.

Chengkang Shen, Hao Zhu, You Zhou et al.

Myocardial motion tracking stands as an essential clinical tool in the prevention and detection of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), the foremost cause of death globally. However, current techniques suffer from incomplete and inaccurate motion estimation of the myocardium in both spatial and temporal dimensions, hindering the early identification of myocardial dysfunction. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Neural Cardiac Motion Field (NeuralCMF). NeuralCMF leverages implicit neural representation (INR) to model the 3D structure and the comprehensive 6D forward/backward motion of the heart. This method surpasses pixel-wise limitations by offering the capability to continuously query the precise shape and motion of the myocardium at any specific point throughout the cardiac cycle, enhancing the detailed analysis of cardiac dynamics beyond traditional speckle tracking. Notably, NeuralCMF operates without the need for paired datasets, and its optimization is self-supervised through the physics knowledge priors in both space and time dimensions, ensuring compatibility with both 2D and 3D echocardiogram video inputs. Experimental validations across three representative datasets support the robustness and innovative nature of the NeuralCMF, marking significant advantages over existing state-of-the-art methods in cardiac imaging and motion tracking.

Delong Wu, Hao Zhu, Qi Zhang et al.

Implicit Neural Representation (INR) has become a popular method for representing visual signals (e.g., 2D images and 3D scenes), demonstrating promising results in various downstream applications. Given its potential as a medium for visual signals, exploring the development of a neural blending method that utilizes INRs is a natural progression. Neural blending involves merging two INRs to create a new INR that encapsulates information from both original representations. A direct approach involves applying traditional image editing methods to the INR rendering process. However, this method often results in blending distortions, artifacts, and color shifts, primarily due to the discretization of the underlying pixel grid and the introduction of boundary conditions for solving variational problems. To tackle this issue, we introduce the Neural Poisson Solver, a plug-and-play and universally applicable framework across different signal dimensions for blending visual signals represented by INRs. Our Neural Poisson Solver offers a variational problem-solving approach based on the continuous Poisson equation, demonstrating exceptional performance across various domains. Specifically, we propose a gradient-guided neural solver to represent the solution process of the variational problem, refining the target signal to achieve natural blending results. We also develop a Poisson equation-based loss and optimization scheme to train our solver, ensuring it effectively blends the input INR scenes while preserving their inherent structure and semantic content. The lack of dependence on additional prior knowledge makes our method easily adaptable to various task categories, highlighting its versatility. Comprehensive experimental results validate the robustness of our approach across multiple dimensions and blending tasks.

Kang You, Pan Gao, Zhan Ma

The past several years have witnessed the emergence of learned point cloud compression (PCC) techniques. However, current learning-based lossless point cloud attribute compression (PCAC) methods either suffer from high computational complexity or deteriorated compression performance. Moreover, the significant variations in point cloud scale and sparsity encountered in real-world applications make developing an all-in-one neural model a challenging task. In this paper, we propose PoLoPCAC, an efficient and generic lossless PCAC method that achieves high compression efficiency and strong generalizability simultaneously. We formulate lossless PCAC as the task of inferring explicit distributions of attributes from group-wise autoregressive priors. A progressive random grouping strategy is first devised to efficiently resolve the point cloud into groups, and then the attributes of each group are modeled sequentially from accumulated antecedents. A locality-aware attention mechanism is utilized to exploit prior knowledge from context windows in parallel. Since our method directly operates on points, it can naturally avoids distortion caused by voxelization, and can be executed on point clouds with arbitrary scale and density. Experiments show that our method can be instantly deployed once trained on a Synthetic 2k-ShapeNet dataset while enjoying continuous bit-rate reduction over the latest G-PCCv23 on various datasets (ShapeNet, ScanNet, MVUB, 8iVFB). Meanwhile, our method reports shorter coding time than G-PCCv23 on the majority of sequences with a lightweight model size (2.6MB), which is highly attractive for practical applications. Dataset, code and trained model are available at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/PoLoPCAC.

Xu Zhang, Ming Lu, Yan Chen et al.

In recent years, compressed domain semantic inference has primarily relied on learned image coding models optimized for mean squared error (MSE). However, MSE-oriented optimization tends to yield latent spaces with limited semantic richness, which hinders effective semantic inference in downstream tasks. Moreover, achieving high performance with these models often requires fine-tuning the entire vision model, which is computationally intensive, especially for large models. To address these problems, we introduce Perception-Oriented Latent Coding (POLC), an approach that enriches the semantic content of latent features for high-performance compressed domain semantic inference. With the semantically rich latent space, POLC requires only a plug-and-play adapter for fine-tuning, significantly reducing the parameter count compared to previous MSE-oriented methods. Experimental results demonstrate that POLC achieves rate-perception performance comparable to state-of-the-art generative image coding methods while markedly enhancing performance in vision tasks, with minimal fine-tuning overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/NJUVISION/POLC.

Ren Yang, Radu Timofte, Jing Liu et al.

This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on quality enhancement of compressed video, with a focus on the proposed methods and results. In this challenge, the new Large-scale Diverse Video (LDV) dataset is employed. The challenge has three tracks. Tracks 1 and 2 aim at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP, while Track 3 is designed for enhancing the videos compressed by x265 at a fixed bit-rate. Besides, the quality enhancement of Tracks 1 and 3 targets at improving the fidelity (PSNR), and Track 2 targets at enhancing the perceptual quality. The three tracks totally attract 482 registrations. In the test phase, 12 teams, 8 teams and 11 teams submitted the final results of Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of video quality enhancement. The homepage of the challenge: https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE21_VEnh

Qi Yang, Yujie Zhang, Siheng Chen et al.

In this paper, we propose a new distortion quantification method for point clouds, the multiscale potential energy discrepancy (MPED). Currently, there is a lack of effective distortion quantification for a variety of point cloud perception tasks. Specifically, for dense point clouds, a distortion quantification method is used to predict human subjective scores and optimize the selection of human perception tasks parameters, such as compression and enhancement. For sparse point clouds, a distortion quantification methods is work as a loss function to guide the training of deep neural networks for unsupervised learning tasks (e.g., point cloud reconstruction, completion and upsampling). Therefore, an effective distortion quantification should be differentiable, distortion discriminable and have a low computational complexity. However, current distortion quantification cannot satisfy all three conditions. To fill this gap, we propose a new point cloud feature description method, the point potential energy (PPE), inspired by the classical physics. We regard the point clouds are systems that have potential energy and the distortion can change the total potential energy. By evaluating at various neighborhood sizes, the proposed MPED achieves global-local tradeoffs, capturing distortion in a multiscale fashion. We further theoretically show that classical Chamfer distance is a special case of our MPED. Extensive experiments show the proposed MPED superior to current methods on both human and machine perception tasks. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/Qi-Yangsjtu/MPED.

Zhen Liu, Hao Zhu, Qi Zhang et al.

Implicit Neural Representation (INR), which utilizes a neural network to map coordinate inputs to corresponding attributes, is causing a revolution in the field of signal processing. However, current INR techniques suffer from a restricted capability to tune their supported frequency set, resulting in imperfect performance when representing complex signals with multiple frequencies. We have identified that this frequency-related problem can be greatly alleviated by introducing variable-periodic activation functions, for which we propose FINER. By initializing the bias of the neural network within different ranges, sub-functions with various frequencies in the variable-periodic function are selected for activation. Consequently, the supported frequency set of FINER can be flexibly tuned, leading to improved performance in signal representation. We demonstrate the capabilities of FINER in the contexts of 2D image fitting, 3D signed distance field representation, and 5D neural radiance fields optimization, and we show that it outperforms existing INRs.

Qi Zhao, M. Salman Asif, Zhan Ma

The primary focus of Neural Representation for Videos (NeRV) is to effectively model its spatiotemporal consistency. However, current NeRV systems often face a significant issue of spatial inconsistency, leading to decreased perceptual quality. To address this issue, we introduce the Pyramidal Neural Representation for Videos (PNeRV), which is built on a multi-scale information connection and comprises a lightweight rescaling operator, Kronecker Fully-connected layer (KFc), and a Benign Selective Memory (BSM) mechanism. The KFc, inspired by the tensor decomposition of the vanilla Fully-connected layer, facilitates low-cost rescaling and global correlation modeling. BSM merges high-level features with granular ones adaptively. Furthermore, we provide an analysis based on the Universal Approximation Theory of the NeRV system and validate the effectiveness of the proposed PNeRV.We conducted comprehensive experiments to demonstrate that PNeRV surpasses the performance of contemporary NeRV models, achieving the best results in video regression on UVG and DAVIS under various metrics (PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and FVD). Compared to vanilla NeRV, PNeRV achieves a +4.49 dB gain in PSNR and a 231% increase in FVD on UVG, along with a +3.28 dB PSNR and 634% FVD increase on DAVIS.

Junjia Wang, Bo Xiong, You Zhou et al.

The emergence of virtual staining technology provides a rapid and efficient alternative for researchers in tissue pathology. It enables the utilization of unlabeled microscopic samples to generate virtual replicas of chemically stained histological slices, or facilitate the transformation of one staining type into another. The remarkable performance of generative networks, such as CycleGAN, offers an unsupervised learning approach for virtual coloring, overcoming the limitations of high-quality paired data required in supervised learning. Nevertheless, large-scale color transformation necessitates processing large field-of-view images in patches, often resulting in significant boundary inconsistency and artifacts. Additionally, the transformation between different colorized modalities typically needs further efforts to modify loss functions and tune hyperparameters for independent training of networks. In this study, we introduce a general virtual staining framework that is adaptable to various conditions. We propose a loss function based on the value mapping constraint to ensure the accuracy of virtual coloring between different pathological modalities, termed the Value Mapping Generative Adversarial Network (VM-GAN). Meanwhile, we present a confidence-based tiling method to address the challenge of boundary inconsistency arising from patch-wise processing. Experimental results on diverse data with varying staining protocols demonstrate that our method achieves superior quantitative indicators and improved visual perception.

Bowen Gu, Hao Chen, Ming Lu et al.

Deep video compression has made significant progress in recent years, achieving rate-distortion performance that surpasses that of traditional video compression methods. However, rate control schemes tailored for deep video compression have not been well studied. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based $λ$-domain rate control scheme for deep video compression, which determines the coding parameter $λ$ for each to-be-coded frame based on the rate-distortion-$λ$ (R-D-$λ$) relationships directly learned from uncompressed frames, achieving high rate control accuracy efficiently without the need for pre-encoding. Moreover, this content-aware scheme is able to mitigate inter-frame quality fluctuations and adapt to abrupt changes in video content. Specifically, we introduce two neural network-based predictors to estimate the relationship between bitrate and $λ$, as well as the relationship between distortion and $λ$ for each frame. Then we determine the coding parameter $λ$ for each frame to achieve the target bitrate. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves high rate control accuracy at the mini-GOP level with low time overhead and mitigates inter-frame quality fluctuations across video content of varying resolutions.

Wenhao Zhang, Hao Zhu, Delong Wu et al.

Pursuing a continuous visual representation that offers flexible frequency modulation and fast rendering speed has recently garnered increasing attention in the fields of 3D vision and graphics. However, existing representations often rely on frequency guidance or complex neural network decoding, leading to spectrum loss or slow rendering. To address these limitations, we propose WIPES, a universal Wavelet-based vIsual PrimitivES for representing multi-dimensional visual signals. Building on the spatial-frequency localization advantages of wavelets, WIPES effectively captures both the low-frequency "forest" and the high-frequency "trees." Additionally, we develop a wavelet-based differentiable rasterizer to achieve fast visual rendering. Experimental results on various visual tasks, including 2D image representation, 5D static and 6D dynamic novel view synthesis, demonstrate that WIPES, as a visual primitive, offers higher rendering quality and faster inference than INR-based methods, and outperforms Gaussian-based representations in rendering quality.

Ruiqi Zhang, Hao Zhu, Jingyi Zhao et al.

3D classification with point cloud input is a fundamental problem in 3D vision. However, due to the discrete nature and the insufficient material description of point cloud representations, there are ambiguities in distinguishing wire-like and flat surfaces, as well as transparent or reflective objects. To address these issues, we propose Gaussian Splatting (GS) point cloud-based 3D classification. We find that the scale and rotation coefficients in the GS point cloud help characterize surface types. Specifically, wire-like surfaces consist of multiple slender Gaussian ellipsoids, while flat surfaces are composed of a few flat Gaussian ellipsoids. Additionally, the opacity in the GS point cloud represents the transparency characteristics of objects. As a result, ambiguities in point cloud-based 3D classification can be mitigated utilizing GS point cloud as input. To verify the effectiveness of GS point cloud input, we construct the first real-world GS point cloud dataset in the community, which includes 20 categories with 200 objects in each category. Experiments not only validate the superiority of GS point cloud input, especially in distinguishing ambiguous objects, but also demonstrate the generalization ability across different classification methods.

Tong Chen, Zhan Ma

Deep neural network-based image compression has been extensively studied. However, the model robustness which is crucial to practical application is largely overlooked. We propose to examine the robustness of prevailing learned image compression models by injecting negligible adversarial perturbation into the original source image. Severe distortion in decoded reconstruction reveals the general vulnerability in existing methods regardless of their settings (e.g., network architecture, loss function, quality scale). A variety of defense strategies including geometric self-ensemble based pre-processing, and adversarial training, are investigated against the adversarial attack to improve the model's robustness. Later the defense efficiency is further exemplified in real-life image recompression case studies. Overall, our methodology is simple, effective, and generalizable, making it attractive for developing robust learned image compression solutions. All materials are made publicly accessible at https://njuvision.github.io/RobustNIC for reproducible research.

Jianqiang Wang, Dandan Ding, Zhu Li et al.

This study develops a unified Point Cloud Geometry (PCG) compression method through the processing of multiscale sparse tensor-based voxelized PCG. We call this compression method SparsePCGC. The proposed SparsePCGC is a low complexity solution because it only performs the convolutions on sparsely-distributed Most-Probable Positively-Occupied Voxels (MP-POV). The multiscale representation also allows us to compress scale-wise MP-POVs by exploiting cross-scale and same-scale correlations extensively and flexibly. The overall compression efficiency highly depends on the accuracy of estimated occupancy probability for each MP-POV. Thus, we first design the Sparse Convolution-based Neural Network (SparseCNN) which stacks sparse convolutions and voxel sampling to best characterize and embed spatial correlations. We then develop the SparseCNN-based Occupancy Probability Approximation (SOPA) model to estimate the occupancy probability either in a single-stage manner only using the cross-scale correlation, or in a multi-stage manner by exploiting stage-wise correlation among same-scale neighbors. Besides, we also suggest the SparseCNN based Local Neighborhood Embedding (SLNE) to aggregate local variations as spatial priors in feature attribute to improve the SOPA. Our unified approach not only shows state-of-the-art performance in both lossless and lossy compression modes across a variety of datasets including the dense object PCGs (8iVFB, Owlii, MUVB) and sparse LiDAR PCGs (KITTI, Ford) when compared with standardized MPEG G-PCC and other prevalent learning-based schemes, but also has low complexity which is attractive to practical applications.

Ming Lu, Peiyao Guo, Huiqing Shi et al.

A Transformer-based Image Compression (TIC) approach is developed which reuses the canonical variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture with paired main and hyper encoder-decoders. Both main and hyper encoders are comprised of a sequence of neural transformation units (NTUs) to analyse and aggregate important information for more compact representation of input image, while the decoders mirror the encoder-side operations to generate pixel-domain image reconstruction from the compressed bitstream. Each NTU is consist of a Swin Transformer Block (STB) and a convolutional layer (Conv) to best embed both long-range and short-range information; In the meantime, a casual attention module (CAM) is devised for adaptive context modeling of latent features to utilize both hyper and autoregressive priors. The TIC rivals with state-of-the-art approaches including deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based learnt image coding (LIC) methods and handcrafted rules-based intra profile of recently-approved Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, and requires much less model parameters, e.g., up to 45% reduction to leading-performance LIC.

Haojie Liu, Ming Lu, Zhiqi Chen et al.

Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in learnt video coding. Most algorithms have solely relied on the vector-based motion representation and resampling (e.g., optical flow based bilinear sampling) for exploiting the inter frame redundancy. In spite of the great success of adaptive kernel-based resampling (e.g., adaptive convolutions and deformable convolutions) in video prediction for uncompressed videos, integrating such approaches with rate-distortion optimization for inter frame coding has been less successful. Recognizing that each resampling solution offers unique advantages in regions with different motion and texture characteristics, we propose a hybrid motion compensation (HMC) method that adaptively combines the predictions generated by these two approaches. Specifically, we generate a compound spatiotemporal representation (CSTR) through a recurrent information aggregation (RIA) module using information from the current and multiple past frames. We further design a one-to-many decoder pipeline to generate multiple predictions from the CSTR, including vector-based resampling, adaptive kernel-based resampling, compensation mode selection maps and texture enhancements, and combines them adaptively to achieve more accurate inter prediction. Experiments show that our proposed inter coding system can provide better motion-compensated prediction and is more robust to occlusions and complex motions. Together with jointly trained intra coder and residual coder, the overall learnt hybrid coder yields the state-of-the-art coding efficiency in low-delay scenario, compared to the traditional H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC, as well as recently published learning-based methods, in terms of both PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics.

Jiaoyang Yin, Yiling Xu, Hao Chen et al.

Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) decision plays a crucial role for ensuring satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) in video streaming applications, in which past network statistics are mainly leveraged for future network bandwidth prediction. However, most algorithms, either rules-based or learning-driven approaches, feed throughput traces or classified traces based on traditional statistics (i.e., mean/standard deviation) to drive ABR decision, leading to compromised performances in specific scenarios. Given the diverse network connections (e.g., WiFi, cellular and wired link) from time to time, this paper thus proposes to learn the ANT (a.k.a., Accurate Network Throughput) model to characterize the full spectrum of network throughput dynamics in the past for deriving the proper network condition associated with a specific cluster of network throughput segments (NTS). Each cluster of NTS is then used to generate a dedicated ABR model, by which we wish to better capture the network dynamics for diverse connections. We have integrated the ANT model with existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based ABR decision engine, where different ABR models are applied to respond to the accurate network sensing for better rate decision. Extensive experiment results show that our approach can significantly improve the user QoE by 65.5% and 31.3% respectively, compared with the state-of-the-art Pensive and Oboe, across a wide range of network scenarios.

Ming Lu, Tong Chen, Dandan Ding et al.

Inspired by the facts that retinal cells actually segregate the visual scene into different attributes (e.g., spatial details, temporal motion) for respective neuronal processing, we propose to first decompose the input video into respective spatial texture frames (STF) at its native spatial resolution that preserve the rich spatial details, and the other temporal motion frames (TMF) at a lower spatial resolution that retain the motion smoothness; then compress them together using any popular video coder; and finally synthesize decoded STFs and TMFs for high-fidelity video reconstruction at the same resolution as its native input. This work simply applies the bicubic resampling in decomposition and HEVC compliant codec in compression, and puts the focus on the synthesis part. For resolution-adaptive synthesis, a motion compensation network (MCN) is devised on TMFs to efficiently align and aggregate temporal motion features that will be jointly processed with corresponding STFs using a non-local texture transfer network (NL-TTN) to better augment spatial details, by which the compression and resolution resampling noises can be effectively alleviated with better rate-distortion efficiency. Such "Decomposition, Compression, Synthesis (DCS)" based scheme is codec agnostic, currently exemplifying averaged $\approx$1 dB PSNR gain or $\approx$25% BD-rate saving, against the HEVC anchor using reference software. In addition, experimental comparisons to the state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies are conducted to further report the efficiency and generalization of DCS algorithm, promising an encouraging direction for future video coding.

Jianqiang Wang, Dandan Ding, Zhu Li et al.

Recent years have witnessed the growth of point cloud based applications because of its realistic and fine-grained representation of 3D objects and scenes. However, it is a challenging problem to compress sparse, unstructured, and high-precision 3D points for efficient communication. In this paper, leveraging the sparsity nature of point cloud, we propose a multiscale end-to-end learning framework which hierarchically reconstructs the 3D Point Cloud Geometry (PCG) via progressive re-sampling. The framework is developed on top of a sparse convolution based autoencoder for point cloud compression and reconstruction. For the input PCG which has only the binary occupancy attribute, our framework translates it to a downscaled point cloud at the bottleneck layer which possesses both geometry and associated feature attributes. Then, the geometric occupancy is losslessly compressed using an octree codec and the feature attributes are lossy compressed using a learned probabilistic context model.Compared to state-of-the-art Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC) and Geometry-based PCC (G-PCC) schemes standardized by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), our method achieves more than 40% and 70% BD-Rate (Bjontegaard Delta Rate) reduction, respectively. Its encoding runtime is comparable to that of G-PCC, which is only 1.5% of V-PCC.

Haojie Liu, Ming Lu, Zhan Ma et al.

Over the past two decades, traditional block-based video coding has made remarkable progress and spawned a series of well-known standards such as MPEG-4, H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC. On the other hand, deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown their powerful capacity for visual content understanding, feature extraction and compact representation. Some previous works have explored the learnt video coding algorithms in an end-to-end manner, which show the great potential compared with traditional methods. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep neural video coding framework (NVC), which uses variational autoencoders (VAEs) with joint spatial and temporal prior aggregation (PA) to exploit the correlations in intra-frame pixels, inter-frame motions and inter-frame compensation residuals, respectively. Novel features of NVC include: 1) To estimate and compensate motion over a large range of magnitudes, we propose an unsupervised multiscale motion compensation network (MS-MCN) together with a pyramid decoder in the VAE for coding motion features that generates multiscale flow fields, 2) we design a novel adaptive spatiotemporal context model for efficient entropy coding for motion information, 3) we adopt nonlocal attention modules (NLAM) at the bottlenecks of the VAEs for implicit adaptive feature extraction and activation, leveraging its high transformation capacity and unequal weighting with joint global and local information, and 4) we introduce multi-module optimization and a multi-frame training strategy to minimize the temporal error propagation among P-frames. NVC is evaluated for the low-delay causal settings and compared with H.265/HEVC, H.264/AVC and the other learnt video compression methods following the common test conditions, demonstrating consistent gains across all popular test sequences for both PSNR and MS-SSIM distortion metrics.

Qi Yang, Zhan Ma, Yiling Xu et al.

We propose the GraphSIM -- an objective metric to accurately predict the subjective quality of point cloud with superimposed geometry and color impairments. Motivated by the facts that human vision system is more sensitive to the high spatial-frequency components (e.g., contours, edges), and weighs more to the local structural variations rather individual point intensity, we first extract geometric keypoints by resampling the reference point cloud geometry information to form the object skeleton; we then construct local graphs centered at these keypoints for both reference and distorted point clouds, followed by collectively aggregating color gradient moments (e.g., zeroth, first, and second) that are derived between all other points and centered keypoint in the same local graph for significant feature similarity (a.k.a., local significance) measurement; Final similarity index is obtained by pooling the local graph significance across all color channels and by averaging across all graphs. Our GraphSIM is validated using two large and independent point cloud assessment datasets that involve a wide range of impairments (e.g., re-sampling, compression, additive noise), reliably demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance for all distortions with noticeable gains in predicting the subjective mean opinion score (MOS), compared with those point-wise distance-based metrics adopted in standardization reference software. Ablation studies have further shown that GraphSIM is generalized to various scenarios with consistent performance by examining its key modules and parameters.

Qi Xia, Haojie Liu, Zhan Ma

The Object-Based Image Coding (OBIC) that was extensively studied about two decades ago, promised a vast application perspective for both ultra-low bitrate communication and high-level semantical content understanding, but it had rarely been used due to the inefficient compact representation of object with arbitrary shape. A fundamental issue behind is how to efficiently process the arbitrary-shaped objects at a fine granularity (e.g., feature element or pixel wise). To attack this, we have proposed to apply the element-wise masking and compression by devising an object segmentation network for image layer decomposition, and parallel convolution-based neural image compression networks to process masked foreground objects and background scene separately. All components are optimized in an end-to-end learning framework to intelligently weigh their (e.g., object and background) contributions for visually pleasant reconstruction. We have conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate the performance on PASCAL VOC dataset at a very low bitrate scenario (e.g., $\lesssim$0.1 bits per pixel - bpp) which have demonstrated noticeable subjective quality improvement compared with JPEG2K, HEVC-based BPG and another learned image compression method. All relevant materials are made publicly accessible at https://njuvision.github.io/Neural-Object-Coding/.

Yueyu Hu, Wenhan Yang, Zhan Ma et al.

Image compression is one of the most fundamental techniques and commonly used applications in the image and video processing field. Earlier methods built a well-designed pipeline, and efforts were made to improve all modules of the pipeline by handcrafted tuning. Later, tremendous contributions were made, especially when data-driven methods revitalized the domain with their excellent modeling capacities and flexibility in incorporating newly designed modules and constraints. Despite great progress, a systematic benchmark and comprehensive analysis of end-to-end learned image compression methods are lacking. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive literature survey of learned image compression methods. The literature is organized based on several aspects to jointly optimize the rate-distortion performance with a neural network, i.e., network architecture, entropy model and rate control. We describe milestones in cutting-edge learned image-compression methods, review a broad range of existing works, and provide insights into their historical development routes. With this survey, the main challenges of image compression methods are revealed, along with opportunities to address the related issues with recent advanced learning methods. This analysis provides an opportunity to take a further step towards higher-efficiency image compression. By introducing a coarse-to-fine hyperprior model for entropy estimation and signal reconstruction, we achieve improved rate-distortion performance, especially on high-resolution images. Extensive benchmark experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model in rate-distortion performance and time complexity on multi-core CPUs and GPUs. Our project website is available at https://huzi96.github.io/compression-bench.html.

Haojie Liu, Han shen, Lichao Huang et al.

Traditional video compression technologies have been developed over decades in pursuit of higher coding efficiency. Efficient temporal information representation plays a key role in video coding. Thus, in this paper, we propose to exploit the temporal correlation using both first-order optical flow and second-order flow prediction. We suggest an one-stage learning approach to encapsulate flow as quantized features from consecutive frames which is then entropy coded with adaptive contexts conditioned on joint spatial-temporal priors to exploit second-order correlations. Joint priors are embedded in autoregressive spatial neighbors, co-located hyper elements and temporal neighbors using ConvLSTM recurrently. We evaluate our approach for the low-delay scenario with High-Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC), H.264/AVC and another learned video compression method, following the common test settings. Our work offers the state-of-the-art performance, with consistent gains across all popular test sequences.

Ming Cheng, Zhan Ma, M. Salman Asif et al.

This paper presents a dual camera system for high spatiotemporal resolution (HSTR) video acquisition, where one camera shoots a video with high spatial resolution and low frame rate (HSR-LFR) and another one captures a low spatial resolution and high frame rate (LSR-HFR) video. Our main goal is to combine videos from LSR-HFR and HSR-LFR cameras to create an HSTR video. We propose an end-to-end learning framework, AWnet, mainly consisting of a FlowNet and a FusionNet that learn an adaptive weighting function in pixel domain to combine inputs in a frame recurrent fashion. To improve the reconstruction quality for cameras used in reality, we also introduce noise regularization under the same framework. Our method has demonstrated noticeable performance gains in terms of both objective PSNR measurement in simulation with different publicly available video and light-field datasets and subjective evaluation with real data captured by dual iPhone 7 and Grasshopper3 cameras. Ablation studies are further conducted to investigate and explore various aspects (such as reference structure, camera parallax, exposure time, etc) of our system to fully understand its capability for potential applications.

Jianqiang Wang, Hao Zhu, Zhan Ma et al.

This paper presents a novel end-to-end Learned Point Cloud Geometry Compression (a.k.a., Learned-PCGC) framework, to efficiently compress the point cloud geometry (PCG) using deep neural networks (DNN) based variational autoencoders (VAE). In our approach, PCG is first voxelized, scaled and partitioned into non-overlapped 3D cubes, which is then fed into stacked 3D convolutions for compact latent feature and hyperprior generation. Hyperpriors are used to improve the conditional probability modeling of latent features. A weighted binary cross-entropy (WBCE) loss is applied in training while an adaptive thresholding is used in inference to remove unnecessary voxels and reduce the distortion. Objectively, our method exceeds the geometry-based point cloud compression (G-PCC) algorithm standardized by well-known Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) with a significant performance margin, e.g., at least 60% BD-Rate (Bjontegaard Delta Rate) gains, using common test datasets. Subjectively, our method has presented better visual quality with smoother surface reconstruction and appealing details, in comparison to all existing MPEG standard compliant PCC methods. Our method requires about 2.5MB parameters in total, which is a fairly small size for practical implementation, even on embedded platform. Additional ablation studies analyze a variety of aspects (e.g., cube size, kernels, etc) to explore the application potentials of our learned-PCGC.

Ming Lu, Ming Cheng, Yiling Xu et al.

Networked video applications, e.g., video conferencing, often suffer from poor visual quality due to unexpected network fluctuation and limited bandwidth. In this paper, we have developed a Quality Enhancement Network (QENet) to reduce the video compression artifacts, leveraging the spatial and temporal priors generated by respective multi-scale convolutions spatially and warped temporal predictions in a recurrent fashion temporally. We have integrated this QENet as a standard-alone post-processing subsystem to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compliant decoder. Experimental results show that our QENet demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance against default in-loop filters in HEVC and other deep learning based methods with noticeable objective gains in Peak-Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and subjective gains visually.

Haojie Liu, Tong Chen, Peiyao Guo et al.

This paper proposes a novel Non-Local Attention Optimized Deep Image Compression (NLAIC) framework, which is built on top of the popular variational auto-encoder (VAE) structure. Our NLAIC framework embeds non-local operations in the encoders and decoders for both image and latent feature probability information (known as hyperprior) to capture both local and global correlations, and apply attention mechanism to generate masks that are used to weigh the features for the image and hyperprior, which implicitly adapt bit allocation for different features based on their importance. Furthermore, both hyperpriors and spatial-channel neighbors of the latent features are used to improve entropy coding. The proposed model outperforms the existing methods on Kodak dataset, including learned (e.g., Balle2019, Balle2018) and conventional (e.g., BPG, JPEG2000, JPEG) image compression methods, for both PSNR and MS-SSIM distortion metrics.

Chao Huang, Haojie Liu, Tong Chen et al.

We propose a MultiScale AutoEncoder(MSAE) based extreme image compression framework to offer visually pleasing reconstruction at a very low bitrate. Our method leverages the "priors" at different resolution scale to improve the compression efficiency, and also employs the generative adversarial network(GAN) with multiscale discriminators to perform the end-to-end trainable rate-distortion optimization. We compare the perceptual quality of our reconstructions with traditional compression algorithms using High-Efficiency Video Coding(HEVC) based Intra Profile and JPEG2000 on the public Cityscapes and ADE20K datasets, demonstrating the significant subjective quality improvement.

Haojie Liu, Tong Chen, Qiu Shen et al.

We present a lossy image compression method based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which outperforms the existing BPG, WebP, JPEG2000 and JPEG as measured via multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM), at the same bit rate. Currently, most of the CNNs based approaches train the network using a L2 loss between the reconstructions and the ground-truths in the pixel domain, which leads to over-smoothing results and visual quality degradation especially at a very low bit rate. Therefore, we improve the subjective quality with the combination of a perception loss and an adversarial loss additionally. To achieve better rate-distortion optimization (RDO), we also introduce an easy-to-hard transfer learning when adding quantization error and rate constraint. Finally, we evaluate our method on public Kodak and the Test Dataset P/M released by the Computer Vision Lab of ETH Zurich, resulting in averaged 7.81% and 19.1% BD-rate reduction over BPG, respectively.

Peiyao Guo, Qiu Shen, Zhan Ma et al.

Conventional images/videos are often rendered within the central vision area of the human visual system (HVS) with uniform quality. Recent virtual reality (VR) device with head mounted display (HMD) extends the field of view (FoV) significantly to include both central and peripheral vision areas. It exhibits the unequal image quality sensation among these areas because of the non-uniform distribution of photoreceptors on our retina. We propose to study the sensation impact on the image subjective quality with respect to the eccentric angle $θ$ across different vision areas. Often times, image quality is controlled by the quantization stepsize $q$ and spatial resolution $s$, separately and jointly. Therefore, the sensation impact can be understood by exploring the $q$ and/or $s$ in terms of the $θ$, resulting in self-adaptive analytical models that have shown quite impressive accuracy through independent cross validations. These models can further be applied to give different quality weights at different regions, so as to significantly reduce the transmission data size but without subjective quality loss. As demonstrated in a gigapixel imaging system, we have shown that the image rendering can be speed up about 10$\times$ with the model guided unequal quality scales, in comparison to the the legacy scheme with uniform quality scales everywhere.

Shaowei Xie, Qiu Shen, Yiling Xu et al.

Immersive video offers the freedom to navigate inside virtualized environment. Instead of streaming the bulky immersive videos entirely, a viewport (also referred to as field of view, FoV) adaptive streaming is preferred. We often stream the high-quality content within current viewport, while reducing the quality of representation elsewhere to save the network bandwidth consumption. Consider that we could refine the quality when focusing on a new FoV, in this paper, we model the perceptual impact of the quality variations (through adapting the quantization stepsize and spatial resolution) with respect to the refinement duration, and yield a product of two closed-form exponential functions that well explain the joint quantization and resolution induced quality impact. Analytical model is cross-validated using another set of data, where both Pearson and Spearman's rank correlation coefficients are close to 0.98. Our work is devised to optimize the adaptive FoV streaming of the immersive video under limited network resource. Numerical results show that our proposed model significantly improves the quality of experience of users, with about 9.36\% BD-Rate (Bjontegaard Delta Rate) improvement on average as compared to other representative methods, particularly under the limited bandwidth.

Zhan Ma, Hao Hu, Meng Xu et al.

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of spatial, temporal and amplitude resolution (STAR) on the bit rate of a compressed video. We propose an analytical rate model in terms of the quantization stepsize, frame size and frame rate. Experimental results reveal that the increase of the video rate as the individual resolution increases follows a power function. Hence, the proposed model expresses the rate as the product of power functions of the quantization stepsize, frame size and frame rate, respectively. The proposed rate model is analytically tractable, requiring only four content dependent parameters. We also propose methods for predicting the model parameters from content features that can be computed from original video. Simulation results show that model predicted rates fit the measured data very well with high Pearson correlation (PC) and small relative root mean square error (RRMSE). The same model function works for different coding scenarios (including scalable and non-scalable video, temporal prediction using either hierarchical B or IPPP structure, etc.) with very high accuracy (average PC $>$ 0.99), but the values of model parameters differ. Using the proposed rate model and the quality model introduced in a separate work, we show how to optimize the STAR for a given rate constraint, which is important for both encoder rate control and scalable video adaptation. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to order the spatial, temporal and amplitude layers of a scalable video in a rate-quality optimized way.