  Video compression relies heavily on exploiting the temporal redundancy
between video frames, which is usually achieved by estimating and using the
motion information. The motion information is represented as optical flows in
most of the existing deep video compression networks. Indeed, these networks
often adopt pre-trained optical flow estimation networks for motion estimation.
The optical flows, however, may be less suitable for video compression due to
the following two factors. First, the optical flow estimation networks were
trained to perform inter-frame prediction as accurately as possible, but the
optical flows themselves may cost too many bits to encode. Second, the optical
flow estimation networks were trained on synthetic data, and may not generalize
well enough to real-world videos. We address the twofold limitations by
enhancing the optical flows in two stages: offline and online. In the offline
stage, we fine-tune a trained optical flow estimation network with the motion
information provided by a traditional (non-deep) video compression scheme, e.g.
H.266/VVC, as we believe the motion information of H.266/VVC achieves a better
rate-distortion trade-off. In the online stage, we further optimize the latent
features of the optical flows with a gradient descent-based algorithm for the
video to be compressed, so as to enhance the adaptivity of the optical flows.
We conduct experiments on a state-of-the-art deep video compression scheme,
DCVC. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed offline and online
enhancement together achieves on average 12.8% bitrate saving on the tested
videos, without increasing the model or computational complexity of the decoder
side.
