IBC2022 Tech Papers: Towards an AI-enhanced video coding standard

This paper describes the ongoing activities of the Enhanced Video coding (EVC) project of the Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial Intelligence (MPAI). Theproject investigates how the performances of existing codecs can be improved by enhancing or replacing specific encoding tools with AI-based counterparts. The MPEG EVC codec baseline profile has been chosen as reference as it relies on encoding tools thatare at least 20 years mature yet has compression efficiency close to HEVC. A framework has been developed to interface the encoder/decoder with neural networks, independently from the specific learning toolkit, simplifying experimentation. So far, the EVCproject has investigated the intra prediction and the super resolution coding tools. The standard intra prediction modes have been integrated by a learnable predictor: experiments in standard test conditions show rate reductions for intra coded frames in excess of 4% over the reference.The use of super resolution, a state-of-the-art deep-learning approach named Densely Residual Laplacian Network (DRLN),at the decoder side have been found to provide further gains, over the reference, in the order of 3% inthe SD to HD context