A Smart Reference Picture Resampling Approach for VVC

Resampling-based coding, i.e. down-sampling before encoding and up-sampling after decoding, has been recognized to be an effective tool for compressing high-resolution videos at low bitrates. The newest video coding standard, Versatile Video Coding (VVC), supports resampling-based coding via a mechanism named Reference Picture Resampling (RPR), where the spatial resolution can be changed without inserting an intra frame. Intuitively, it is not wise to utilize a single resolution throughout the whole video, because frames with different contents may prefer different coding resolutions. In this paper, we propose a smart reference picture resampling approach, namely smart-RPR, where the coding-resolution of a frame is determined based on the property of the frame without multiple-pass encoding. Specifically, we first down- and up-sample a frame without considering compression and compare the up-sampled frame with the original frame to obtain the resampling distortion, which is then compared with a threshold to decide whether to code the frame in a resampling way. Then, we build up an exponential model to approximate the optimal threshold. In addition, we also study how to derive the coding parameters of the down-sampled frame to achieve better performance. Simulation results on the VTM-12.0 show that the proposed method could achieve 2.72%, 5.29%, and 10.82% BD-rate reductions for Y, Cb, and Cr components, respectively, with lower encoding and decoding complexity.