arXiv:2611.07148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent works in neural video coding have increasingly been trading off perceptual quality against reconstruction fidelity at a fixed bitrate. Wasserstein Distortion (WD) offers a principled approach to balancing these objectives by relaxing spatial correspondences in feature matching, enabling lightweight overfitted image codecs to compete with computationally intensive generative decoders. Extending vanilla WD to video, however, presents two challenges: its independent Gaussian approximation limits the expressiveness of feature distribution matching, while unconstrained texture resampling across frames introduces temporal inconsistencies. We address these challenges by distinguishing between the correspondences that can be relaxed and those that must be preserved. Spatially, we introduce a local sliced Wasserstein distortion (SWD) that matches empirical feature distributions through one-dimensional optimal transport, capturing cross-channel dependencies without enforcing exact spatial alignment. Temporally, we employ a novel flow residual that constrains coding errors along motion trajectories, preserving temporal consistency without imposing additional reconstruction fidelity constraints. Evaluated on UVG and HEVC Class B with the overfitted codec COOL-CHIC, our framework achieves BD-rate reductions of 9.2% in DISTS and 3.0% in LPIPS relative to frame-wise WD, averaged over test sequences, while lowering tOF by 10.2% at matched rate.
Perceptual Distortion for Overfitted Video Coding: Sliced Matching in Space, Error Alignment in Time
A new arXiv paper (2611.07148v1) reports that a sliced Wasserstein distortion (SWD) combined with a flow-residual temporal constraint cuts BD-rate by 9.2% in DISTS and 3.0% in LPIPS versus frame-wise Wasserstein Distortion when evaluated on UVG and HEVC Class B with the overfitted codec COOL-CHIC, averaged over test sequences, while lowering tOF by 10.2% at matched rate. The authors address two limits of extending vanilla WD to video: an independent Gaussian approximation that restricts feature distribution matching, and unconstrained texture resampling that causes temporal inconsistency. The method matches empirical feature distributions via one-dimensional optimal transport spatially and constrains coding errors along motion trajectories temporally, preserving temporal consistency without added reconstruction fidelity constraints.
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