Multiscale Motion-Aware and Spatial-Temporal-Channel Contextual Coding Network for Learned Video Compression

Abstract: Recently, learned video compression has achieved exciting performance. Following the traditional hybrid prediction coding framework, most learned methods generally adopt the motion estimation motion compensation (MEMC) method to remove inter-frame redundancy. However, inaccurate motion vector (MV) usually lead to the distortion of reconstructed frame. In addition, most approaches ignore the spatial and channel redundancy. To solve above problems, we propose a motion-aware and spatial-temporal-channel contextual coding based video compression network (MASTC-VC), which learns the latent representation and uses variational autoencoders (VAEs) to capture the characteristics of intra-frame pixels and inter-frame motion. Specifically, we design a multiscale motion-aware module (MS-MAM) to estimate spatial-temporal-channel consistent motion vector by utilizing the multiscale motion prediction information in a coarse-to-fine way. On the top of it, we further propose a spatial-temporal-channel contextual module (STCCM), which explores the correlation of latent representation to reduce the bit consumption from spatial, temporal and channel aspects respectively. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed MASTC-VC is surprior to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on three public benchmark datasets. More specifically, our method brings average 10.15\% BD-rate savings against H.265/HEVC (HM-16.20) in PSNR metric and average 23.93\% BD-rate savings against H.266/VVC (VTM-13.2) in MS-SSIM metric.