Standard Compatible Efficient Video Coding with Jointly Optimized Neural Wrappers

We present a standard-compatible video coding scheme with end-to-end optimized neural wrapper over standard video codecs that achieves significant rate-distortion (R-D) performance gains and is still efficient in decoding. We train a pair of pre- and post-processor using a differential JPEG proxy. The pre-processor applies a learned transform to the video and downsamples the video by a factor of 2. It generates a bottleneck video to be coded by a standard codec as a YUV sequence. The post-processor takes the decoded bottleneck video, does the inverse transform, and upsamples it to the original resolution. We follow the design in [1] , where we configure downsample using a layer of strided convolution. We optimize the post-processor for efficiency by replacing convolutions with kernel size larger than 1×1 to depth-wise convolutions [2].