RDVC: Efficient Deep Video Compression With Regulable Rate and Complexity Optimization
Xiaojie Wei, Jielian Lin, Jiawei Xu, Wei Gao, Tiesong Zhao · IEEE Transactions on Multimedia · 2025
Deep video coding has paved a way to break through the performance bottleneck of reigning hybrid video coding. However, unlike hybrid video codecs, existing deep video codecs cannot offer both flexible rates and regulable complexities within one single codec, which limits their applications. In this article, we propose a Regulable Deep Video Codec (RDVC) to address the above issue. First, we propose an Adaptive Feature Compression (AFC) network that generates variable rates while ensuring Rate-Distortion (RD) performance. The network introduces a two-stage coarse-to-fine rate adjustment that can be controlled by a user-specified rate level. Second, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Feature Propagation (STFP) mechanism to provide high-quality reference information for AFC process. Third, we also utilize slimmable convolutional components in our framework to adjust decoding complexity constrained by user configuration. Experimental results demonstrate that RDVC can adjust the codec structure flexibly according to different user configurations while maintaining advanced performance. On average, it reduces the bit-per-pixel (bpp) by 9.35%$/$58.12% while maintaining the same PSNR/MS-SSIM as the reference software VTM-13.2.