Gated fusion network for SAO filter and inter frame prediction in Versatile Video Coding

Shiba Kuanar, Vassilis Athitsos, Dwarikanath Mahapatra, K. R. Rao

Abstract: Highlights•We presented a gated fusion-guided framework in our model design, which effectively combines the inter–intra frame local and temporal feature heterogeneity.•Our decoupled model includes a modified loss function to constrain the pixel errors and incorporates the intermediate convolution feature maps through skip connections.•Our loss function can be viewed as a generalization of MSE at each batch and adds image gradients as priors for final image reconstruction.•A data-driven deconvolution framework is integrated into the decoder module to overcome the quantization artifacts.•The end-to-end framework learns the feature map aggregation in separate sub-tasks, optimizes the parameters, and reduces the noise to a greater capacity.•Our model’s qualitative and quantitative evaluation shows the effectiveness of artifact removal, especially at crowded target regions, and performs favorably against the existing in-loop deep learning models.