Improvement of Conventional Deinterlacing Methods with Extrema Detection and Interpolation

This article presents a new algorithm for spatial deinterlacing that could easily be integrated in a more complete deinterlacing system, typically a spatio-temporal motion adaptive one. The spatial interpolation part often fails to reconstruct close to horizontal lines with a proper continuity, leading to highly visible artifacts. Our system preserves the structure continuity taking into account that the misinterpolated points usually correspond to local value extrema. The processing is based on chained lists and connected graph construction. The new interpolation method is restricted to such structures, for the rest of the image, a proper traditional directional spatial interpolation gives satisfactory results already. Although the number of pixels affected by the extrema interpolation is relatively small, the overall image quality is subjectively well improved. Moreover, our solution allows to gain back one of the major advantages of motion compensation methods, without having to afford their complexity cost.