VCT: A Video Compression Transformer

Fabian Mentzer, George Toderici, David Minnen, Sergi Caelles, Sung Jin Hwang, Mario Lucic, Eirikur Agustsson

Keywords: Video compression, transformers

TL;DR: We use Transformers for video compression, simplifying the setup while still outperforming previous methods.

Abstract: We show how transformers can be used to vastly simplify neural video compression. Previous methods have been relying on an increasing number of architectural biases and priors, including motion prediction and warping operations, resulting in complex models. Instead, we independently map input frames to representations and use a transformer to model their dependencies, letting it predict the distribution of future representations given the past. The resulting video compression transformer outperforms previous methods on standard video compression data sets. Experiments on synthetic data show that our model learns to handle complex motion patterns such as panning, blurring and fading purely from data. Our approach is easy to implement, and we release code to facilitate future research.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2206.07307/code)