Motion-compensated frame rate up-conversion for reduction of blocking artifacts

Abstract

In this paper, a frame rate up-conversion (FRC) algorithm using the motion vector frequency of neighboring blocks to reduce the block artifacts caused by failure of conventional motion estimation (ME) based on block matching algorithm (BMA) is proposed. The proposed method is based on the Spiral Full Search with early termination, which is applied to avoid the local minima on pattern-like image. Also, the motion vector correction that replaces a low frequency motion vector by a high frequency motion vector of neighborhood is used in the proposed method to reduce the block artifacts caused by the failure of conventional ME. In addition, bi-directional motion compensated interpolation (MCI) using the blocking index to reduce the block artifacts in occlusion area is used in the proposed method. Experimental results show good performance of the proposed scheme with significant reduction of the erroneous motion vectors and block artifacts. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.