Exploiting Bidirectional Quality Impulse for Reference Picture Resampled Gaming Video Coding

Recent years have witnessed a variety of applications of gaming video coding, while how to improve the coding efficiency has been relatively under-explored. The state-of-the-art video coding standard, Versatile Video Coding (VVC), adopts the Reference Picture Resampling (RPR) which allows the variation of the frame resolutions in encoding/decoding. The great flexibility supported by RPR motivates us to develop a bidirectional quality impulse based guidance scheme, in an effort to fully exploit the potential of RPR in gaming video coding. The design philosophy involves reducing the data volume on the encoder side through selective downsampling, and enhancing reconstruction by harnessing quality conveyance from neighboring frames. More specifically, a new RPR structure is developed based on the underlying philosophy that the periodic quality impulse could promisingly boost the quality of the whole sequence. On top of the developed structure, we propose a bidirectional guidance model that faithfully enhances video quality by resorting to frames with quality impulse. Experimental results exhibit the proposed scheme can achieve significant bit-rate savings for gaming videos.