Video Compression Artifact Reduction by Fusing Motion Compensation and Global Context in a Swin-CNN Based Parallel Architecture

Video Compression Artifact Reduction aims to reduce the artifacts caused by video compression algorithms and improve the quality of compressed video frames. The critical challenge in this task is to make use of the redundant high-quality information in compressed frames for compensation as much as possible. Two important possible compensations: Motion compensation and global context, are not comprehensively considered in previous works, leading to inferior results. The key idea of this paper is to fuse the motion compensation and global context together to gain more compensation information to improve the quality of compressed videos. Here, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Compensation Fusion (STCF) framework with the Parallel Swin-CNN Fusion (PSCF) block, which can simultaneously learn and merge the motion compensation and global context to reduce the video compression artifacts. Specifically, a temporal self-attention strategy based on shifted windows is developed to capture the global context in an efficient way, for which we use the Swin transformer layer in the PSCF block. Moreover, an additional Ada-CNN layer is applied in the PSCF block to extract the motion compensation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed STCF framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods up to 0.23dB (27% improvement) on the MFQEv2 dataset.