Transformer-Based Data-Driven Video Coding Acceleration for Industrial Applications

With the exploding development of edge intelligence and smart industry, deep learning-based intelligent industrial solutions are promptly applied in the manufacturing process. Many intelligent industrial solutions such as automatic manufacturing inspection are computer vision based and require fast and efficient video encoding techniques so that video streams can be processed as quickly as possible either at the edge cluster or over the cloud. As one of the most popular video coding standards, the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard has been applied to various industrial scenes. However, HEVC brings not only a higher compression rate but also a significant increase in encoding complexity, which hinders its practical application in industrial scenarios. Fortunately, a large amount of video coding data makes it possible to accelerate the encoding process in the industry. To speed up the video coding process in some industrial scenes, this paper proposes a data-driven fast approach for coding tree unit (CTU) partitioning in HEVC intracoding. First, we propose a method to represent the partition result of a CTU as a column vector of length 21. Then, we employ lots of encoding data produced in normal industry scenes to train transformer models used to predict the partitioning vector of the CTU. Finally, the final partitioning structure of the CTU is generated from the partitioning vector after a postprocessing operation and used by an industrial encoder. Compared with the original HEVC encoder used by some industrial applications, experiment results show that our approach achieves 58.77% encoding time reduction with 3.9% bit rate loss, which indicates that our data-driven approach for video coding has great capacity working in industrial applications.