Enhancing Quality for VVC Compressed Videos with Omniscient Quality Enhancement Model

Abstract: The latest video coding standard H.266/VVC has shown its great improvement in terms of compression performance when compared to its predecessor HEVC standard. Though VVC was implemented with many advanced techniques, it still met the same challenges as its predecessor due to the need for even higher perceptual quality demand at the decoder side as well as the compression performance at the encoder side. The advancement of AI technology, notably the deep learning-based video quality enhancement methods, was shown to be a promising approach to improving the perceptual quality experience. In this paper, we propose a novel Omniscient video quality enhancement Network for VVC compressed Videos. The Omniscient Network for compressed video quality enhancement was originally designed for HEVC compressed videos in which not only the spatial-temporal features but also cross-frequencies information were employed to augment the visual quality. Inspired by this work, we propose a modification of the OVQE model and integrate it into the lasted STD-VVC (Standard Versatile Video Coding) decoder architecture. As assessed in a rich set of test conditions, the proposed OVQE-VVC solution is able to achieve significant PSNR improvement, notably around 0.74 dB and up to 1.2 dB with respect to the original STD-VVC codec. This also corresponds to around 19.6% of bitrate saving while keeping a similar quality observation.