Super Efficient Neural Network for Compression Artifacts Reduction and Super Resolution

Video quality can suffer from limited internet speed while being streamed by users. Compression artifacts start to appear when the bitrate decreases to match the available bandwidth. Existing algorithms either focus on removing the compression artifacts at the same video resolution, or on upscaling the video resolution but not removing the artifacts. Super resolution-only approaches will amplify the artifacts along with the details by default. We propose a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN)-based algorithm which simultaneously performs artifacts reduction and super resolution (ARSR) by enhancing the feature extraction layers and designing a custom training dataset. The output of this neural network is evaluated for test streams compressed at low bitrates using variable bitrate (VBR) encoding. The output video quality shows a 4–6 increase in video multi-method assessment fusion (VMAF) score compared to traditional interpolation upscaling approaches such as Lanczos or Bicubic.