Deep Reference Frame for Versatile Video Coding with Structural Re-parameterization

In video coding, inter-prediction leverages neigh-boring frames to reduce temporal redundancy. The quality of these reference frames is essential for effective inter-prediction. Although many neural network-based methods have been proposed to improve the quality of reference frames, there is still room for the performance and efficiency trade-off. In this paper, we propose an interpolation diverse branch block (InterDBB) suitable for lightweight frame interpolation networks, which optimizes deep reference frame interpolation networks to improve performance without sacrificing speed and increasing complexity. Specifically, we propose a multi-branch structural reparameterization block without batch normalization. This straightforward yet effective modification ensures training stability and performance improvement. Moreover, we propose a parameterized motion estimation strategy based on different input resolution, to achieve a better trade-off between performance and computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves -2.01%/-2.87%/-2.44% coding efficiency improvements for Y/U/V components under random access (RA) configuration compared to VTM-11.0_NNVC-5.0.