A Cross-Framework Study of Temporal Information Buffering Strategies for Learned Video Compression

Recent advances in learned video codecs have demonstrated remarkable compression efficiency. Two fundamental design aspects are critical: the choice of inter-frame coding framework and the temporal information propagation strategy. Inter-frame coding frameworks include residual coding, conditional coding, conditional residual coding, and masked conditional residual coding, each with distinct mechanisms for utilizing temporal predictions. Temporal propagation methods can be categorized as explicit, implicit, or hybrid buffering, differing in how past decoded information is stored and used. However, a comprehensive study covering all possible combinations is still lacking. This work systematically evaluates the impact of explicit, implicit, and hybrid buffering on coding performance across four inter-frame coding frameworks under a unified experimental setup, providing a thorough understanding of their effectiveness.