Conditional Coding and Variable Bitrate for Practical Learned Video Coding
This addresses the need for flexible video compression in applications like streaming, but it is incremental as it matches existing standards without surpassing them.
The paper tackled the problem of creating a practical learned video codec with variable bitrate capability, achieving performance on par with HEVC under CLIC21 video test conditions.
This paper introduces a practical learned video codec. Conditional coding and quantization gain vectors are used to provide flexibility to a single encoder/decoder pair, which is able to compress video sequences at a variable bitrate. The flexibility is leveraged at test time by choosing the rate and GOP structure to optimize a rate-distortion cost. Using the CLIC21 video test conditions, the proposed approach shows performance on par with HEVC.