BVI-DVC: A Training Database for Deep Video Compression

Deep learning methods are increasingly being applied in the optimisation of video compression algorithms and can achieve significantly enhanced coding gains, compared to conventional approaches. Such approaches often employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) which are trained on databases with relatively limited content coverage. In this paper, a new extensive and representative video database, BVI-DVC, is presented for training CNN-based coding tools. BVI-DVC contains 800 sequences at various spatial resolutions from 270p to 2160p and has been evaluated on ten existing network architectures for four different coding tools. Experimental results show that the database produces significant improvements in terms of coding gains over three existing (commonly used) image/video training databases, for all tested CNN architectures under the same training and evaluation configurations.