AI Poised to Transform Video Compression Landscape

upstart writes:

Apple's WaveOne purchase heralds a new era in smart-streaming of AR and video:

Apple's surprise purchase at the end of last month of WaveOne, a California-based startup that develops content-aware AI algorithms for video compression, showcases an important shift in how video signals are streamed to our devices. In the near-term Cuppertino's purchase will likely lead to smart video-compression tools in Apple's video-creation products and in the development of its much-discussed augmented-reality headset.

However, Apple isn't alone. Startups in the AI video codec space are likely to prove acquisition targets for other companies trying to keep up.

[...] AI codecs, having been developed over the course of decades, use machine-learning algorithms to analyze and understand the visual content of a video, identify redundancies and nonfunctional data, and compress the video in a more efficient way. They use learning-based techniques instead of manually designed tools for encoding and can use different ways to measure encoding quality beyond traditional distortion measures. Recent advancements, like attention mechanisms, help them understand the data better and optimize visual quality.

During the first half of the 2010s, Netflix and a California-based company called Harmonic helped to spearhead a movement of what's called "content-aware" encoding. CAE, as Harmonic calls it, uses AI to analyze and identify the most important parts of a video scene, and to allocate more bits to those parts for better visual quality, while reducing the bit rate for less important parts of the scene.

Content-aware video compression adjusts an encoder for different resolutions of encoding, adjusts the bit rate according to content, and adjusts the quality score-the perceived quality of a compressed video compared to the original uncompressed video. All those things can be done by neural encoders as well.

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