Adaptive Arbitration of Intra-Field and Motion Compensation Methods for De-Interlacing

De-interlacing based on motion compensation (MC) is one of the best ways of improving the resolution of a progressive video converted from an interlaced source. However, the converted frames often suffer from serious defects like feathering artifacts in regions with inaccurate motion vectors (MVs). In such regions, an intra-field method that is robust to MV errors can be used to correct motion compensation artifacts (MCAs). In this letter, we propose an adaptive arbitration method to combine intra-field and MC methods adequately. The proposed method considers the reliability of MC results along with the MV reliability measured by the spatio-temporal consistency of MVs and displaced pixel differences. The MC reliability is determined by detecting MCAs in MC results, and then the MV reliability is adjusted according to the MC reliability. Also, adaptive-weight MC and pseudo MC methods are proposed to provide more reliable MC results and to improve the accuracy of MCA detection, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides high-quality video sequences while reducing many visible artifacts.