DiffVC-RT: Towards Practical Real-Time Diffusion-based Perceptual Neural Video Compression

The practical deployment of diffusion-based Neural Video Compression (NVC) faces critical challenges, including severe information loss, prohibitive inference latency, and poor temporal consistency. To bridge this gap, we propose DiffVC-RT, the first framework designed to achieve real-time diffusion-based perceptual NVC. First, we introduce an Efficient and Informative Model Architecture. Through strategic module replacements and pruning, this architecture significantly reduces computational complexity while mitigating structural information loss. Second, to address generative flickering artifacts, we propose Explicit and Implicit Consistency Modeling. We enhance temporal consistency by explicitly incorporating a zero-cost Online Temporal Shift Module within the U-Net, complemented by hybrid implicit consistency constraints. Finally, we present an Asynchronous and Parallel Decoding Pipeline incorporating Mixed Half Precision, which enables asynchronous latent decoding and parallel frame reconstruction via a Batch-dimension Temporal Shift design. Experiments show that DiffVC-RT achieves 80.1% bitrate savings in terms of LPIPS over VTM-17.0 on HEVC dataset with real-time encoding and decoding speeds of 206 / 30 fps for 720p videos on an NVIDIA H800 GPU, marking a significant milestone in diffusion-based video compression.

DiffVC-OSD: One-Step Diffusion-based Perceptual Neural Video Compression Framework

In this work, we first propose DiffVC-OSD, a One-Step Diffusion-based Perceptual Neural Video Compression framework. Unlike conventional multi-step diffusion-based methods, DiffVC-OSD feeds the reconstructed latent representation directly into a One-Step Diffusion Model, enhancing perceptual quality through a single diffusion step guided by both temporal context and the latent itself. To better leverage temporal dependencies, we design a Temporal Context Adapter that encodes conditional inputs into multi-level features, offering more fine-grained guidance for the Denoising Unet. Additionally, we employ an End-to-End Finetuning strategy to improve overall compression performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffVC-OSD achieves state-of-the-art perceptual compression performance, offers about 20$\times$ faster decoding and a 86.92\% bitrate reduction compared to the corresponding multi-step diffusion-based variant.