FAIVconf: Face Enhancement for AI-Based Video Conference with Low Bit-Rate

Abstract

Recently, high-quality video conferencing with fewer transmission bits becomes a very hot and challenging problem. We propose FAIVConf, a specially designed video compression framework for video conferencing, based on the effective neural human face generation techniques. FAIVConf brings together several designs to improve the system robustness in real video conference scenarios: face swapping to avoid artifacts in background animation; facial blurring to decrease transmission bit-rate and maintain quality of extracted facial landmarks; and dynamic source update for face view interpolation to accommodate a large range of head poses. Our method achieves significant bit-rate reduction in video conference and gives much better visual quality under the same bit-rate compared with H.264 and H.265 coding schemes.