An Adaptive Occluded Region Detection and Interpolation for Robust Frame Rate Up-Conversion

— FRUC (Frame Rate Up-Conversion) technique needs an effective frame interpolation algorithm using motion information between adjacent neighboring frames. In order to have good visual qualities in the interpolated frames, it is necessary to develop an effective detection and interpolation algorithms for occluded regions. For this aim, this paper proposes an effective occluded region detection algorithm through the adaptive forward and backward motion searches and also by introducing the minimum value of normalized cross-correlation coefficient (NCCC). That is, the proposed scheme looks for the location with the minimum sum of absolute differences (SAD) and this value is compared to that of the location with the maximum value of NCCC based on the statistics of those relations. And, these results are compared with the size of motion vector and then the proposed algorithm decides whether the given block is the occluded region or not. Furthermore, once the occluded regions are classified, then this paper proposes an adaptive interpolation algorithm for occluded regions, which still exist in the merged frame, by using the neighboring pixel information and the available data in the occluded block. Computer simulations show that the proposed algorithm can effectively classify the occluded region, compared to the conventional SAD-based method and the performance of the proposed interpolation algorithm has better PSNR than the conventional algorithms.