MCI-embedded Motion Compensated Prediction for Quality Enhancement of Frame Interpolation

A new technique based on motion compensated prediction is investigated in this research to enhance the quality of interpolated frames in frame-rate up-conversion applications. To playback temporally subsampled video at the full frame-rate, motion compensated interpolation (MCI) is usually employed to reconstruct skipped frames by referencing the decoded frames and motion vectors between them. Since the conventional motion estimation scheme (as adopted in H.26X and MPEG-X) adopts the block matching algorithm (BMA) only between reference and predicted frames, the derived motion vectors for skipped frames are limited in supporting MCI at the decoder end. Thus, by embedding the MCI module in the encoder loop, the performance gain of an embedded encoder improves the frame interpolation accuracy of the decoder. In particular, a two-step approach is considered in this work. First, by incorporating compensation e ciency of both predicted and interpolated frames, a re ning scheme for reference motion vectors is proposed. Next, e cient weighting of reference motion vectors, which is similar to window weighting of overlapped block motion compensation (OBMC), is adopted to enhance deformable block-based MCI with four vertex motion vectors. Experimental results are provided to illustrate the performance gain of the proposed frame interpolation scheme.