We propose a video compression framework using conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We rely on two encoders: one that deploys a standard video codec and another which generates low-level maps via a pipeline of down-sampling, a newly devised soft edge detector, and a novel lossless compression scheme. For decoding, we use a standard video decoder as well as a neural network based one, which is trained using a conditional GAN. Recent "deep" approaches to video compression require multiple videos to pre-train generative networks to conduct interpolation. In contrast to this prior work, our scheme trains a generative decoder on pairs of a very limited number of key frames taken from a single video and corresponding low-level maps. The trained decoder produces reconstructed frames relying on a guidance of low-level maps, without any interpolation. Experiments on a diverse set of 131 videos demonstrate that our proposed GAN-based compression engine achieves much higher quality reconstructions at very low bitrates than prevailing standard codecs such as H.264 or HEVC.
@article{arxiv.1811.10673,
title = {Adversarial Video Compression Guided by Soft Edge Detection},
author = {Sungsoo Kim and Jin Soo Park and Christos G. Bampis and Jaeseong Lee and Mia K. Markey and Alexandros G. Dimakis and Alan C. Bovik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.10673},
year = {2018}
}