Enhancing HEVC Spatial Prediction by Context-based Learning

Deep generative models have been recently employed to compress images, image residuals or to predict image regions. Based on the observation that state-of-the-art spatial prediction is highly optimized from a rate-distortion point of view, in this work we study how learning-based approaches might be used to further enhance this prediction. To this end, we propose an encoder-decoder convolutional network able to reduce the energy of the residuals of HEVC intra prediction, by leveraging the available context of previously decoded neigh-boring blocks. The proposed context-based prediction enhancement (CBPE) scheme enables to reduce the mean square error of HEVC prediction by 25% on average, without any additional signalling cost in the bitstream.