  The past decade has witnessed great success of deep learning technology in
many disciplines, especially in computer vision and image processing. However,
deep learning-based video coding remains in its infancy. This paper reviews the
representative works about using deep learning for image/video coding, which
has been an actively developing research area since the year of 2015. We divide
the related works into two categories: new coding schemes that are built
primarily upon deep networks (deep schemes), and deep network-based coding
tools (deep tools) that shall be used within traditional coding schemes or
together with traditional coding tools. For deep schemes, pixel probability
modeling and auto-encoder are the two approaches, that can be viewed as
predictive coding scheme and transform coding scheme, respectively. For deep
tools, there have been several proposed techniques using deep learning to
perform intra-picture prediction, inter-picture prediction, cross-channel
prediction, probability distribution prediction, transform, post- or in-loop
filtering, down- and up-sampling, as well as encoding optimizations. In the
hope of advocating the research of deep learning-based video coding, we present
a case study of our developed prototype video codec, namely Deep Learning Video
Coding (DLVC). DLVC features two deep tools that are both based on
convolutional neural network (CNN), namely CNN-based in-loop filter (CNN-ILF)
and CNN-based block adaptive resolution coding (CNN-BARC). Both tools help
improve the compression efficiency by a significant margin. With the two deep
tools as well as other non-deep coding tools, DLVC is able to achieve on
average 39.6\% and 33.0\% bits saving than HEVC, under random-access and
low-delay configurations, respectively. The source code of DLVC has been
released for future researches.
