Complexity-guided Slimmable Decoder for Efficient Deep Video Compression

In this work, we propose the complexity-guided slimmable decoder (cgSlimDecoder) in combination with skip-adaptive entropy coding (SaEC) for efficient deep video compression. Specifically, given the target complexity constraints, in our cgSlimDecoder, we introduce a set of new channel width selection modules to automatically decide the optimal channel width of each slimmable convolution layer. By optimizing the complexity-rate-distortion related objective function to directly learn the parameters of the newly introduced channel width selection modules and other modules in the decoder, our cgSlimDecoder can automatically allocate the optimal numbers of parameters for different types of modules (e.g., motion/residual decoder and the motion compensation network) and simultaneously support multiple complexity levels by using a single learnt decoder instead of multiple decoders. In addition, our proposed SaEC can further accelerate the entropy decoding procedure in both motion and residual decoders by simply skipping the entropy coding process for the elements in the encoded feature maps that are already well-predicted by the hyperprior network. As demonstrated in our comprehensive experiments, our newly proposed methods cgSlimDecoder and SaEC are general and can be readily incorporated into three widely used deep video codecs (i.e., DVC, FVC and DCVC) to significantly improve their coding efficiency with negligible performance drop.