Fast global motion-compensated frame interpolator for very low-bit-rate video quality enhancement

We propose a fast frame interpolator at the decoder end to enhance the temporal quality of real-time low-bit-rate video applications, such as cellular video conferencing. The proposed frame interpolator operates in a block-based fashion instead of a pixel-based one to achieve the real-time speed. The global motion model is adopted in our scheme to interpolate camera motion. Our scheme fully utilizes the received block-based motion vectors from the encoder to minimize the complexity of the global motion search. Furthermore, the majority of the local motion vectors for moving object interpolation can be directly derived without performing a complex local motion search at the decoder end. Experiment shows that the proposed algorithm can interpolate frames in real-time and successfully remove jigger artifacts caused by the low frame rate.