Enhanced Surveillance Video Compression with Dual Reference Frames Generation

In this paper, we improve the inter coding performance of surveillance videos by simultaneously investigating the distinct characteristics of background and foreground redundancy, and introduce two novel reference frames in a complementary manner. On one hand, a block level background reference frame (BRF) is proposed to reduce the background redundancy. The proposed scheme incorporates semantic information into the compression process, and makes use of instance segmentation to facilitate the background block decision, making the generated BRF free from foreground pollution. On the other hand, in order to handle foreground redundancy, a foreground reference frame (FRF) is generated based on Surveillance Prediction Generative Adversarial Network (SP-GAN), which utilizes previous reconstructed frames, optical flow based prediction, as well as BRF to infer the foreground objects of the to-be-coded frame. We integrate the proposed scheme into HM-16.6 software and append BRF and FRF to the reference pictures list (RPS). Simulation results demonstrate considerable superiority of the proposed scheme. In particular, by adding the proposed BRF to RPS, 3% coding gains are observed compared with the state-of-the-art BRF method. When both BRF and FRF are incorporated into RPS, 5.8% gains are achieved for surveillance video coding.