Semantic Neural Rendering-based Video Coding: Towards Ultra-Low Bitrate Video Conferencing

Yujie Hu, Youmin Xu, Jianhui Chang, Jian Zhang

Abstract: Providing high video quality under the lowest possible bitrate constraint is one of the critical challenges in video coding technology. Inspired by the continuous development of motion imitation [1], the model-based video coding method is derived from extracting a series of features or parameters representing the person's motion and reconstructing each frame by motion imitation model at the decoder. Thus, we propose a Semantic Neural Rendering-based Video Coding framework (SNRVC) to transmit video at ultra-low bitrate while maintaining high subjective quality. At the encoder, we first extract the motion parameters with specific semantic meanings from each frame and then compress the first frame and the parameters of the subsequent frames by truncating to different decimals and differential pulse code modulation coding. Finally, the decoded image and parameters are fed into the motion imitator [2] to obtain each reconstructed frame consistent with the movements of the original frame. Our SNRVC can achieve better visual quality than traditional and model-based methods [3] at the ultra-low bitrate below 0.01 bpp.