A Learning-Based Low Complexity in-Loop Filter for Video Coding

With the continuous development of mobile devices, it becomes possible for people to demand higher definition videos. To alleviate the pressure of deploying the video codec in mobile multimedia, a learning-based low complexity in-loop filter is proposed in this paper. Depthwise separable convolution is combined with batch normalization to construct this model. To enhance its performance, the knowledge from a pre-trained teacher model is transferred to it. However, the over-smoothing problem in the inter frames caused by double enhancing effect remains. To solve this, a Wiener-based filtering algorithm that tries to restore the distortion from the learned residuals is designed and introduces an adequate filtering effect. The experimental results show that our proposed methods achieve considerable BD-rate reduction than HEVC anchor. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art work VR-CNN, our model achieves 1.65% extra BD-rate reduction, 79.1% decrease in FLOPs, 25% decrease in encoding complexity, and 70% decoding complexity decrease.