Towards Practical Real-Time Neural Video Compression

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time neural video codec that achieves high compression efficiency and fast processing speeds by minimizing operational costs through innovative design choices, making neural video compression more practical.

Contribution

The paper introduces efficiency-driven design improvements, including implicit temporal modeling and low-resolution representations, to significantly accelerate neural video coding without quality loss.

Findings

Achieves 125.2 fps encoding speed for 1080p video

Saves 21% bitrate compared to H.266/VTM

Maintains high compression quality with reduced operational costs

Abstract

We introduce a practical real-time neural video codec (NVC) designed to deliver high compression ratio, low latency and broad versatility. In practice, the coding speed of NVCs depends on 1) computational costs, and 2) non-computational operational costs, such as memory I/O and the number of function calls. While most efficient NVCs prioritize reducing computational cost, we identify operational cost as the primary bottleneck to achieving higher coding speed. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a set of efficiency-driven design improvements focused on minimizing operational costs. Specifically, we employ implicit temporal modeling to eliminate complex explicit motion modules, and use single low-resolution latent representations rather than progressive downsampling. These innovations significantly accelerate NVC without sacrificing compression quality. Additionally, we implement model integerization for consistent cross-device coding and a module-bank-based rate control scheme to improve practical adaptability. Experiments show our proposed DCVC-RT achieves an impressive average encoding/decoding speed at 125.2/112.8 fps (frames per second) for 1080p video, while saving an average of 21% in bitrate compared to H.266/VTM. The code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.