Context-Aware Neural Video Compression on Solar Dynamics Observatory
Atefeh Khoshkhahtinat Ali Zafari Piyush M. Mehta Nasser M. Nasrabadi Barbara J. Thompson Michael S. F. Kirk Daniel da Silva
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission collects large data volumes
of the Sun's daily activity. Data compression is crucial for space missions to
reduce data storage and video bandwidth requirements by eliminating
redundancies in the data. In this paper, we present a novel neural
Transformer-based video compression approach specifically designed for the SDO
images. Our primary objective is to efficiently exploit the temporal and
spatial redundancies inherent in solar images to obtain a high compression
ratio. Our proposed architecture benefits from a novel Transformer block called
Fused Local-aware Window (FLaWin), which incorporates window-based
self-attention modules and an efficient fused local-aware feed-forward (FLaFF)
network. This architectural design allows us to simultaneously capture
short-range and long-range information while facilitating the extraction of
rich and diverse contextual representations. Moreover, this design choice
results in reduced computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate
the significant contribution of the FLaWin Transformer block to the compression
performance, outperforming conventional hand-engineered video codecs such as
H.264 and H.265 in terms of rate-distortion trade-off.