Abstract
Motion-compensated frame interpolation (MCFI) is widely used to smoothly display low frame rate video sequences by synthesizing and inserting new frames between existing frames. The temporal shift interpolation technique (TSIT) is popular for frame interpolation of video sequences that are encoded by a block-based video coding standard such as MPEG-4 or H.264/AVC. TSIT assumes the existence of a motion vector (MV) and may not result in high-quality interpolation for intra-mode blocks that do not have MVs. This paper proposes a new frame interpolation algorithm mainly designed for intra-mode blocks. In order to improve the accuracy of pixel interpolation, the new algorithm proposes sub-pixel interpolation and the reuse of MVs for their refinement. In addition, the new algorithm employs two different interpolation modes for inter-mode blocks and intra-mode blocks, respectively. The use of the two modes reduces ghost artifacts but potentially increases blocking effects between the blocks interpolated by different modes. To reduce blocking effects, the proposed algorithm searches the boundary of an object and interpolates all blocks in the object in the same mode. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves PSNR by an average of 0.71dB compared with the TSIT with MV refinement and also significantly improves the subjective quality of pictures by reducing ghost artifacts.
