3D-BitNet: Flow-Agnostic and Precise Network for video Bit-Depth Expansion

Abstract

Bit-depth expansion(BDE) algorithms have made great progress on single image. However, it is hard to directly apply on videos with no temporal constraint. Aiming at the problem of video BDE, we adopt an encoder-decoder structure with 3D convolution to fuse spatial and temporal domain information. The encoder utilizes 3-stage down sampling with 3D ResBlocks to align the features of different time series, the decoder adopt the inverse structure with Coordinate Attention to fuse the aligned features and reconstruct the high bit-depth frame. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that the proposed video BDE network is superior to other methods. Compared with the best BDE algorithm, we obtain a 1.51db improvement on PSNR. With no additional temporal information such as optical flow, our method is also superior in running speed.

Publication
2021 IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB)
Li Song
Li Song
Professor, IEEE Senior Member

Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, the Deputy Director of the Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Double-Appointed Professor of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and the Collaborative Innovation Center of Future Media Network, the Deputy Secretary-General of the China Video User Experience Alliance and head of the standards group.