Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based filters have achieved great success in video coding. However, in most previous works, individual models are needed for each quantization parameter (QP) band. This paper presents a generic method to help an arbitrary CNN-filter handle different quantization noise. We model the quantization noise problem and implement a feasible solution on CNN, which introduces the quantization step (Qstep) into the convolution. When the quantization noise increases, the ability of the CNN-filter to suppress noise improves accordingly. This method can be used directly to replace the (vanilla) convolution layer in any existing CNN-filters. By using only 25% of the parameters, the proposed method achieves better performance than using multiple models with VTM-6.3 anchor. Besides, an additional BD-rate reduction of 0.2% is achieved by our proposed method for chroma components.
@article{arxiv.2010.13059,
title = {A QP-adaptive Mechanism for CNN-based Filter in Video Coding},
author = {Chao Liu and Heming Sun and Jiro Katto and Xiaoyang Zeng and Yibo Fan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.13059},
year = {2020}
}