Neural Network based Video Coding in JVET

After the Versatile Video Coding (VVC)/H.266 standard was completed, the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) began to investigate new technologies that could significantly increase coding gain for the next generation video coding standard. One direction is to investigate signal processing based tools, while the other is to investigate Neural Network based technology. Neural Network based Video Coding (NNVC) has not been studied previously, and this is the first trial of such an approach in the standard group. After two years of research, JVET produced the first common software called Neural Compression Software (NCS) with two NN-based in-loop filtering tools at the 27th meeting and began to maintain NN-based technologies for the common experiment. The coding performances of the two filters in NCS-1.0 are shown to be 8.71% and 9.44% on average in a random access scenario, respectively. All the material related to NCS can be found in the repository of the JVET. In this paper, we provide a brief overview and review of the NNVC activity studied in JVET in order to provide trend and insight for the new direction of video coding standard.