FUVC: A Flexible Codec for Underwater Video Transmission

Smart oceanic exploration has greatly benefitted from AI-driven underwater image and video processing. However, the volume of underwater video content is subject to narrow-band and time-varying underwater acoustic channels. How to support high-utility video transmission at such a limited capacity is still an open issue. In this article, we propose a Flexible Underwater Video Codec (FUVC) with separate designs for targets-of-interest regions and backgrounds. The encoder locates all targets of interest, compresses their corresponding regions with x.265, and, if bandwidth allows, compresses the background with a lower bitrate. The decoder reconstructs both streams, identifies clean targets of interest, and fuses them with the background via a mask detection and background recovery (MDBR) network. When the background stream is unavailable, the decoder adapts all targets of interest to a virtual background via Poisson blending. Experimental results show that FUVC outperforms other codecs with a lower bitrate at the same quality. It also supports a flexible codec for underwater acoustic channels. The database and the source code are available at
https://github.com/z21110008/FUVC
.