Papers for

video codec engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Filterfusion enables fast and accurate video noise removal on CPUs

FilterFusion: Prior-Guided Adaptive Filter Fusion for Efficient Video Denoising

Abstract: Real-world video denoising for communication systems must handle mixed degradations such as sensor noise, compression artifacts, and motion-induced inconsistency while remaining deployable under tight latency budgets. Purely deep models often achieve high accuracy but come with significant computational cost, whereas classical filters are robust and efficient but insufficiently adaptive. We present FilterFusion, a prior-guided multi-frame denoising framework that combines temporally-aware learned features with an interpretable bank of denoising branches. The model predicts a low-cost guidance signal and uses it to adaptively mix a compact set of denoising responses at the original resolution. The lightweight design uses only 109K parameters and explicitly injects temporal variance and spatial variance cues into the low-resolution controller. On CRVD (real sensor noise), it reaches 34.72 dB PSNR and 0.9330 SSIM with only 0.18 GFLOPs (network-only). Because the filter-bank operations are simple and regular (Gaussian blur, median, weighted sum), a straightforward compiled C implementation of the synthesis path achieves 17.9ms per frame (55.9 FPS) on a single CPU thread at 1080p---exceeding real-time and 122--252 times faster than lightweight CNN baselines that require over 2 seconds per frame. The results demonstrate a strong quality-efficiency-speed trade-off and a practical route to real-time denoising through low-resolution control and explicit filter-based synthesis.

Thu 15 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Videos can get noisy or blurry because of camera issues or compression, and cleaning them up is often slow or requires powerful computers. The authors created FilterFusion, a method that mixes several simple filters using a smart guide to clean noisy videos quickly. This approach uses very little computing power yet matches the quality of bigger, slower methods. It runs fast enough for real-time video calls on just one CPU core.
Open → 2610.21505v1

Rate distortion perception framework guides better image and video coding

An Overview of Rate-Distortion-Perception Theory

Abstract: This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the rate-distortion-perception framework, tracing its evolution from mathematical theory to practical deployment. We review the mathematical definition of the the mathematical definition of the Blau--Michaeli function and the associated coding theorems, examine computational methods for its evaluation, and discuss alternative formulations of the framework. Operational principles and design guidelines for modern image and video coding are also presented, highlighting the rate-distortion-perception framework as a rigorous foundation for developing next-generation perceptual compression systems.

Mon 14 SeptInformation Theory
The gist
When pictures and videos are compressed, it's important to keep them looking good while using less space. This paper explains a way to balance file size, quality, and how natural images look using mathematical ideas. The authors review tools for measuring and improving this balance and suggest how to design better compression systems. This helps make videos and images smaller without making them look worse to people.
Open → 2609.15580v1