A Neural Enhancement Post-Processor with a Dynamic AV1 Encoder Configuration Strategy for CLIC 2024

Abstract

At practical streaming bitrates, traditional video compression pipelines frequently lead to visible artifacts that degrade perceptual quality. This submission couples the effectiveness of a neural post-processor with a different dynamic optimsation strategy for achieving an improved bitrate/quality compromise. The neural post-processor is refined via adversarial training and employs perceptual loss functions. By optimising the post-processor and encoder directly our method demonstrates significant improvement in video fidelity. The neural post-processor achieves substantial VMAF score increases of +6.72 and +1.81 at bitrates of 50 kb/s and 500 kb/s respectively.