Neural Video Compression with Feature Modulation
Authors: Jiahao Li, Bin Li, Yan Lu

The emerging conditional coding-based neural video codec (NVC) shows superiority over commonly-used residual coding-based codec and the latest NVC already claims to outperform the best traditional codec. However there still exist critical problems blocking the practicality of NVC. In this paper we propose a powerful conditional coding-based NVC that solves two critical problems via feature modulation. The first is how to support a wide quality range in a single model. Previous NVC with this capability only supports about 3.8 dB PSNR range on average. To tackle this limitation we modulate the latent feature of the current frame via the learnable quantization scaler. During the training we specially design the uniform quantization parameter sampling mechanism to improve the harmonization of encoding and quantization. This results in a better learning of the quantization scaler and helps our NVC support about 11.4 dB PSNR range. The second is how to make NVC still work under a long prediction chain. We expose that the previous SOTA NVC has an obvious quality degradation problem when using a large intra-period setting. To this end we propose modulating the temporal feature with a periodically refreshing mechanism to boost the quality. Notably under single intra-frame setting our codec can achieve 29.7% bitrate saving over previous SOTA NVC with 16% MACs reduction. Our codec serves as a notable landmark in the journey of NVC evolution. The codes are at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.