Generalized interpolators for advanced movement-compensated 50 Hz-60 Hz conversion of interlaced sequences

Several television standards exist for TV and for HDTV signals. The worldwide interchange of programs makes the conversion between them of critical importance. Conventional transcoders use a static interpolation filter which is not able to deal with incorrectly bandlimited television signals. Motion compensation has been introduced in order to adapt interpolation to the signal. This approach proposes movement-oriented filtering and has been shown to give significant improvement. However, the known algorithms do not offer a perfect reconstruction step when the desired pixels have to be interpolated. A new system is proposed for the conversion between the popular interlaced TV standards (625 lines, 50 fields/s or 525 lines, 60 fields/s). The key feature is the use of generalized interpolators that are based on nonuniform sampling theory. The performance is compared with alternative interpolation techniques. In addition, the attached motion estimation algorithm relies on segmentation in the target field (i.e. the unknown 60 Hz field) to avoid assignment problems