NERV++: An Enhanced Implicit Neural Video Representation
This work addresses video compression for applications requiring efficient storage and transmission, representing an incremental improvement over existing INR-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of improving implicit neural representations (INRs) for video compression, which suffer from poor rate-distortion performance and high computational demands, by introducing NeRV++ with separable conv2d residual blocks and bilinear interpolation skip layers, achieving competitive results on UVG, MCL JVC, and Bunny datasets and narrowing the gap to autoencoder-based methods.
Neural fields, also known as implicit neural representations (INRs), have shown a remarkable capability of representing, generating, and manipulating various data types, allowing for continuous data reconstruction at a low memory footprint. Though promising, INRs applied to video compression still need to improve their rate-distortion performance by a large margin, and require a huge number of parameters and long training iterations to capture high-frequency details, limiting their wider applicability. Resolving this problem remains a quite challenging task, which would make INRs more accessible in compression tasks. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by introducing neural representations for videos NeRV++, an enhanced implicit neural video representation, as more straightforward yet effective enhancement over the original NeRV decoder architecture, featuring separable conv2d residual blocks (SCRBs) that sandwiches the upsampling block (UB), and a bilinear interpolation skip layer for improved feature representation. NeRV++ allows videos to be directly represented as a function approximated by a neural network, and significantly enhance the representation capacity beyond current INR-based video codecs. We evaluate our method on UVG, MCL JVC, and Bunny datasets, achieving competitive results for video compression with INRs. This achievement narrows the gap to autoencoder-based video coding, marking a significant stride in INR-based video compression research.