# A Coding Framework and Benchmark towards Low-Bitrate Video Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02813 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02813/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 83 of its 165 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [From Zero to Detail: Deconstructing Ultra-High-Definition Image Restoration from Progressive Spectral Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13165/) (2025)
- [SMC++: Masked Learning of Unsupervised Video Semantic Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04765/) (2024)
- [HERMES: temporal-coHERent long-forM understanding with Episodes and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17443/) (2024)
- [Information Density Principle for MLLM Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10079/) (2025)
- [High Visual-Fidelity Learned Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04679/) (2023)
- [Task-Aware Encoder Control for Deep Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04848/) (2024)
- [Towards All-in-One Medical Image Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08173/) (2025)
- [DT-UFC: Universal Large Model Feature Coding via Peaky-to-Balanced Distribution Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16495/) (2025)
- [Medical Manifestation-Aware De-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10804/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Video Summarization via Iterative Training and Simplified GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03745/) (2023)
- [SDEval: Safety Dynamic Evaluation for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06142/) (2025)
- [Semantics versus Identity: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach towards Adjustable Medical Image De-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21703/) (2025)
- [ROFI: A Deep Learning-Based Ophthalmic Sign-Preserving and Reversible Patient Face Anonymizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11073/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Learned Image Compression with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25316/) (2026)
- [Does the Judge Prefer English? Evaluating Language-Switching Invariance in LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14278/) (2026)
- [A3: Towards Advertising Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24037/) (2026)
- [MambaRaw: Selective State Space Modeling for Efficient 4K Raw Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24479/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video compression is indispensable to most video analysis systems. Despite saving transportation bandwidth, it also deteriorates downstream video understanding tasks, especially at low-bitrate settings. To systematically investigate this problem, we first thoroughly review the previous methods, revealing that three principles, i.e., task-decoupled, label-free, and data-emerged semantic prior, are critical to a machine-friendly coding framework but are not fully satisfied so far. In this paper, we propose a traditional-neural mixed coding framework that simultaneously fulfills all these principles, by taking advantage of both traditional codecs and neural networks (NNs). On one hand, the traditional codecs can efficiently encode the pixel signal of videos but may distort the semantic information. On the other hand, highly non-linear NNs are proficient in condensing video semantics into a compact representation. The framework is optimized by ensuring that a transportation-efficient semantic representation of the video is preserved w.r.t. the coding procedure, which is spontaneously learned from unlabeled data in a self-supervised manner. The videos collaboratively decoded from two streams (codec and NN) are of rich semantics, as well as visually photo-realistic, empirically boosting several mainstream downstream video analysis task performances without any post-adaptation procedure. Furthermore, by introducing the attention mechanism and adaptive modeling scheme, the video semantic modeling ability of our approach is further enhanced. Finally, we build a low-bitrate video understanding benchmark with three downstream tasks on eight datasets, demonstrating the notable superiority of our approach. All codes, data, and models will be available at urlhttps://github.com/tianyuan168326/VCS-Pytorch.