Deep video coding with gradient-descent optimized motion compensation and Lanczos filtering

Variational autoencoders have shown promising results for still image compression and have gained a lot of consideration in this field. Recently, noteworthy attempts were made to extend such end-to-end methods to the setting of video compression. Here, low-latency scenarios have been commonly investigated. In this paper, it is shown that the compression efficiency in this setting is improved by applying tools that are typically used in block-based hybrid coding such as rate-distortion optimized encoding of the features and advanced interpolation filters for computing samples at fractional positions. Additionally, a separate motion estimation network is trained to further increase the compression efficiency. Experimental results show that the rate-distortion performance benefits from including the aforementioned tools.