Abstract
A block-based motion-compensated frame interpolation method and apparatus using a block-based video coder operating in low bit rates. Smooth movement of objects between video frames can be obtained without the complexity of pixel-wise interpolation motion estimation that is present in standard motion-compensated frame interpolation (MCI). An additional motion search for interpolating all of the individual pixel trajectories is not required because the interpolation uses block-based motion vector information from a standard codec such as H.26x/MPEG. Video quality is improved by increasing smoothness and the frame rate is increased without a substantial increase in the computational complexity. The proposed block-based MCI method maps from block-wise motion to pixel-wise motion in a motion vector mapping unit. A morphological closure operation and pattern block refinement segmentation of the blocks are provided to close holes in the moving object block and replace the morphologically closed motion block with the most similar pattern selected from a group of 34 patterns. Experimental results show that the visual quality of coded low-bit-rate video can be significantly improved as compared to the frame repetition scheme at the expense of a small increase in the complexity of the decoder.