WaveOne

WaveOne is a digital media company that uses artificial intelligence to compress videos. It was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel. WaveOne is based in Mountain View, California.

In existing codecs, the compressed representation of a frame consists of the motion vectors and the residual. The decoder applies the motion vectors to the previously decoded frame and adds the residual to reconstruct the current frame. The process is repeated for each frame. Since pixels of an object tend to move together in the same direction, the motion vectors can be represented compactly by grouping nearby pixels and specifying the motion for each group.

WaveOne's model uses deep learning for frame prediction where they fit patterns and predict spatiotemporal patterns from data. The model compresses motion vectors through understanding the motion boundaries and vectors with a more efficient representation of less important areas. In this way, their model can distribute the bandwidth so more important areas have sophisticated motion boundaries and precise motion vectors, rather than the traditional partition of frames into hierarchies of blocks and assigning the same motion vector for all pixels in a block.

The algorithm learns what arbitrary information in frames is important and efficiently compresses the less important information. Through their model's joint compression of motion and residual information, WaveOne's model is able to achieve multi-flow representation with multiple layers of motion vector. And through their model, WaveOne proposes a method for machine learning-based spatial rate control, allowing a single architecture to tune for different bitrates.

WaveOne also states that their model achieves higher quality, less buffering, and lower bandwidth than on standard-definition videos. Relative to their algorithm, HEVC/ H.265, AVC/H.264 and VP9 typically produce codes up to 60% larger. On high-definition 1080p videos, H.265 and VP9 typically produce codes up to 20% larger, and H.264 up to 35% larger. Moreover, WaveOne says their approach does not suffer from blocking artifacts and pixelation.