Neural image compression, based on auto-encoders and overfitted representations, relies on a latent representation of the coded signal. This representation needs to be compact and uses low resolution feature maps. In the decoding process, those latents are upsampled and filtered using stacks of convolution filters and non linear elements to recover the decoded image.Therefore, the upsampling process is crucial in the design of a neural coding scheme and is of particular importance for overfitted codecs where the network parameters, including the upsampling filters, are part of the representation.This paper addresses the improvement of the upsampling process in order to reduce its complexity and limit the number of parameters. A new upsampling structure is presented whose improvements are illustrated within the Cool-Chic overfitted image coding framework. The proposed approach offers a rate reduction of 4.7%. The source code is available [1].

This paper summarises the design of the Cool-Chic candidate for the Challenge on Learned Image Compression. This candidate attempts to demonstrate that neural coding methods can lead to low complexity and lightweight image decoders while still offering competitive performance. The approach is based on the already published overfitted lightweight neural networks Cool-Chic, further adapted to the human subjective viewing targeted in this challenge.

This paper presents a method allowing learned video encoders to apply arbitrary latent refinement strategies to serve as RateDistortion Optimization (RDO) at the time of encoding. To do so, a latent domain search is applied on an initial latent representation of the video signal. This search is implemented as a set of iterations, each of which performs a gradient descent with back-propagation of error defined by a Lagrangian RD cost. This cost function is intentionally chosen to be the same as the cost function that was used during the end-to-end model training, except that instead of updating model weights, each iteration fine-tunes the latent representation itself. Moreover, a temporal look-ahead is integrated in the cost function of I and P frames to take into account the cascade effect of their latent fine-tuning on subsequent frames in the Group of Pictures (GOP). The experiments show that the proposed latent space RDO method can improve by 11.6% and 9.4% in terms of BD-BR coding efficiency in Random-Access (RA) and All-Intra (AI) configurations, when applied on top a high-performance opensource end-to-end codec.

We introduce COOL-CHIC, a Coordinate-based Low Complexity Hierarchical Image Codec. It is a learned alternative to autoencoders with 629 parameters and 680 multiplications per decoded pixel. COOL-CHIC offers compression performance close to modern conventional MPEG codecs such as HEVC and is competitive with popular autoencoder-based systems. This method is inspired by Coordinate-based Neural Representations, where an image is represented as a learned function which maps pixel coordinates to RGB values. The parameters of the mapping function are then sent using entropy coding. At the receiver side, the compressed image is obtained by evaluating the mapping function for all pixel coordinates. COOL-CHIC implementation is made open-source1.

We propose a neural image codec at reduced complexity which overfits the decoder parameters to each input image. While autoencoders perform up to a million multiplications per decoded pixel, the proposed approach only requires 2300 multiplications per pixel. Albeit low-complexity, the method rivals autoencoder performance and surpasses HEVC performance under various coding conditions. Additional lightweight modules and an improved training process provide a 14% rate reduction with respect to previous overfitted codecs, while offering a similar complexity. This work is made open-source at http://orange-opensource.github.io/Cool-Chic/.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the next-generation video coding standard currently under development, which has demonstrated substantial bit savings (rate reduction by approximately half) compared to H.264/AVC. This paper presents the multiple sign bits hiding scheme that was adopted into the committee draft of HEVC at the 8th JCT-VC meeting. In HEVC, the quantized transform coefficients are entropy-coded in groups of 16 coefficients for each transform unit. With multiple sign bits hiding, for coefficient groups that satisfy certain conditions, the sign of the first non-zero coefficient along the scanning path is not explicitly transmitted in the bitstream and instead is inferred from the parity of the sum of all non-zero coefficients in that coefficient group at the decoder. To ensure the matching between the hidden sign and the parity of the sum of all non-zero coefficients, a parity adjustment method is employed at the encoder based on rate-distortion optimization or distortion minimization. Compared with conventional video coding schemes where quantization and coefficient coding are separately designed, the multiple sign bits hiding scheme in HEVC represents a joint quantization and coefficient coding design and provides consistent rate-distortion performance gains for all standard test sequences under standard test conditions.

Unlike H.264/advanced video coding, where parallelism was an afterthought, High Efficiency Video Coding currently contains several proposals aimed at making it more parallel-friendly. A performance comparison of the different proposals, however, has not yet been performed. In this paper, we will fill this gap by presenting efficient implementations of the most promising parallelization proposals, namely tiles and wavefront parallel processing (WPP). In addition, we present a novel approach called overlapped wavefront (OWF), which achieves higher performance and efficiency than tiles and WPP. Experiments conducted on a 12-core system running at 3.33 GHz show that our implementations achieve average speedups, for 4k sequences, of 8.7, 9.3, and 10.7 for WPP, tiles, and OWF, respectively.

The joint development of the upcoming High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group marks a new step in video compression capability. In technical terms, HEVC is a hybrid video-coding approach using quadtree-based block partitioning together with motion-compensated prediction. Even though a high degree of adaptability is achieved by quadtree-based block partitioning, this approach has certain intrinsic drawbacks, which may result in redundant sets of motion parameters being transmitted. Previous work has shown that those redundancies can effectively be removed by merging the leafs of a particular quadtree structure. Following this concept, a block merging algorithm for HEVC is now proposed. This algorithm generates a single motion parameter set for a whole region of contiguous motion-compensated blocks. In this paper, we describe the various components of the proposed block merging algorithm and, using experimental evidence, demonstrate their benefits in terms of coding efficiency.

This paper describes transform coefficient coding in the draft international standard of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) specification and the driving motivations behind its design. Transform coefficient coding in HEVC encompasses the scanning patterns and coding methods for the last significant coefficient, significance map, coefficient levels, and sign data. Special attention is paid to the new methods of last significant coefficient coding, multilevel significance maps, high-throughput binarization, and sign data hiding. Experimental results are provided to evaluate the performance of transform coefficient coding in HEVC.