Visual-weighted motion compensation frame interpolation with motion vector refinement

In this paper, we propose a novel frame rate up-conversion algorithm based on joint motion vector refinement and visual-weighted motion compensation interpolation (MCI). It utilizes a hierarchical motion vector refinement to correct inaccurate motion vectors (MVs), which is composed of the global level and the local level. In the global level, distinct inaccurate MVs are detected by global controlling and then corrected by neighborhood information. Afterwards, the local level performs the local controlling to pick out local outliers and re-estimate them with the maximum likelihood method. Finally, plausible weights for each block in the interpolated frame, computed by the similarity index(SSIM), are applied for visual compensation. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with the conventional algorithm EBME, the proposed algorithm achieved the average PSNR by up to 2.7dB while the visual quality improvement is also remarkable.