NU-Class Net: A Novel Deep Learning-based Approach for Video Quality Enhancement

Video content has experienced a surge in popularity, asserting its dominance over internet traffic and Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Video compression has long been regarded as the primary means of efficiently managing the substantial multimedia traffic generated by video-capturing devices. Nevertheless, video compression algorithms entail significant computational demands in order to achieve substantial compression ratios. This complexity presents a formidable challenge when implementing efficient video coding standards in resource-constrained embedded systems, such as IoT edge node cameras. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces NU-Class Net, an innovative deep-learning model designed to mitigate compression artifacts stemming from lossy compression codecs. This enhancement significantly elevates the perceptible quality of low-bit-rate videos. By employing the NU-Class Net, the video encoder within the video-capturing node can reduce output quality, thereby generating low-bit-rate videos and effectively curtailing both computation and bandwidth requirements at the edge. On the decoder side, which is typically less encumbered by resource limitations, NU-Class Net is applied after the video decoder to compensate for artifacts and approximate the quality of the original video. Experimental results affirm the efficacy of the proposed model in enhancing the perceptible quality of videos, especially those streamed at low bit rates.