MFRNet: A New CNN Architecture for Post-Processing and In-loop Filtering
This improves video compression efficiency for codec developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing CNN-based filtering methods.
The paper tackles video compression by proposing MFRNet, a CNN architecture for post-processing and in-loop filtering, achieving up to 21.0% BD-rate VMAF gain for HEVC and up to 7.1% for VVC.
In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, MFRNet, for post-processing (PP) and in-loop filtering (ILF) in the context of video compression. This network consists of four Multi-level Feature review Residual dense Blocks (MFRBs), which are connected using a cascading structure. Each MFRB extracts features from multiple convolutional layers using dense connections and a multi-level residual learning structure. In order to further improve information flow between these blocks, each of them also reuses high dimensional features from the previous MFRB. This network has been integrated into PP and ILF coding modules for both HEVC (HM 16.20) and VVC (VTM 7.0), and fully evaluated under the JVET Common Test Conditions using the Random Access configuration. The experimental results show significant and consistent coding gains over both anchor codecs (HEVC HM and VVC VTM) and also over other existing CNN-based PP/ILF approaches based on Bjontegaard Delta measurements using both PSNR and VMAF for quality assessment. When MFRNet is integrated into HM 16.20, gains up to 16.0% (BD-rate VMAF) are demonstrated for ILF, and up to 21.0% (BD-rate VMAF) for PP. The respective gains for VTM 7.0 are up to 5.1% for ILF and up to 7.1% for PP.