Neural Video Compression with Diverse Contexts

Abstract: For any video codecs, the coding efficiency highly relies on whether the current signal to be encoded can find the relevant contexts from the previous reconstructed signals. Traditional codec has verified more contexts bring substantial coding gain, but in a time-consuming manner. However, for the emerging neural video codec (NVC), its contexts are still limited, leading to low compression ratio. To boost NVC, this paper proposes increasing the context diversity in both temporal and spatial dimensions. First, we guide the model to learn hierarchical quality patterns across frames, which enriches long-term and yet high-quality temporal contexts. Furthermore, to tap the potential of optical flow-based coding framework, we introduce a group-based offset diversity where the cross-group interaction is proposed for better context mining. In addition, this paper also adopts a quadtree-based partition to increase spatial context diversity when encoding the latent representation in parallel. Experiments show that our codec obtains 23.5% bitrate saving over previous SOTA NVC. Better yet, our codec has surpassed the under-developing next generation traditional codec/ECM in both RGB and YUV420 colorspaces, in terms of PSNR. The codes are at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.