VAE Latent Space Quantization Methods for UAVs Video Stream

In FPV control of unmanned aerial vehicles, video frames are transmitted to the external pilot's station via a down link. Down links utilize mobile and hybrid orbital-terrestrial communication networks. The efficiency increase in their utilization is achieved by reducing the required bandwidth for each FPV-controlled unmanned aircraft. This requires ensuring a high compression rate of video stream frames, for which methods based on the application of variational autoencoders can be used. The principle of their operation is as follows: encoding frames into latent space, quantization and lossless compression. This paper presents new quantization algorithms and investigates the effect of applying different quantization algorithms to compression rate of latent space of VQ-D6 variational autoencoder from Stable Diffusion during further lossless compression using LZMA algorithm. In the result, the most effective quantization is selected to be used together with lossless compression.