Learning to Compress Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Captured Video: Benchmark and Analysis

In this paper, we propose to build a novel benchmark and neural video coding task named learning based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) video coding. We collect the UAV videos with different content variations, including in-door and out-door scenes, object-scale variations and viewpoint distance, different climate condition etc. Then we encode those properly-selected videos using popular end-to-end optimized video codecs and conventional hybrid codecs, to form a comprehensive benchmark for learned drone video compression. We also provide a detailed analysis and envision the challenge of such task for future research. The main contributions of this paper are three folds. First, we construct a comprehensive benchmark for the task of drone video compression which consists of the rate-distortion (R-D) behavior of both hybrid and learned video codecs. To our knowledge, it is the first attempt in end-to-end optimized solution to compress drone videos. Second, we provide the review and analysis of the learned drone video compression schemes and further discuss the challenges of encoding UAV videos. Third, this benchmark and related research is accomplished as a milestone MPAI End-to-end Video (EEV) coding project. The proposed benchmark has constructed a solid baseline for compressing UAV videos and facilitates the future research works for related task.