QEVC: Quality Enhancement-Oriented Video Coding

Quality enhancement (QE) is an important post-processing technology for high-resolution video services at low bit rates, which can effectively improve the quality of compressed video. The application of deep learning methods to the quality enhancement task has achieved great success in the past few years. However, the existing schemes are usually coding-independent, which still leaves room for further development of related technologies. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a quality enhancement-oriented video coding scheme. By analyzing the features of different video regions, a deep reinforcement learning model is used to determine the distortions of regions. Then during the video reconstruction, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based quality enhancement networks with different scales are selected to improve the video quality according to the distortion of different regions. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the HEVC anchor in case of bits saving, bits allocation, and shows good visual quality especially at low bit rates.