Fast Video Visual Quality and Resolution Improvement using SR-UNet

In this paper, we address the problem of real-time video quality enhancement, considering both frame super-resolution and compression artifact-removal. The first operation increases the sampling resolution of video frames, the second removes visual artifacts such as blurriness, noise, aliasing, or blockiness introduced by lossy compression techniques, such as JPEG encoding for single-images, or H.264/H.265 for video data. We propose to use SR-UNet, a novel network architecture based on UNet, that has been specialized for fast visual quality improvement (i.e. capable of operating in less than 40ms, to be able to operate on videos at 25FPS). We show how this network can be used in a streaming context where the content is generated live, e.g. in video calls, and how it can be optimized when video to be streamed are prepared in advance. The network can be used as a final post processing, to optimize the visual appearance of a frame before showing it to the end-user in a video player. Thus, it can be applied without any change to existing video coding and transmission pipelines. Experiments carried on standard video datasets, also considering the H.265 compression, show that the proposed approach is able to either improve visual quality metrics given a fixed bandwidth budget, or video distortion given a fixed quality goal.