High quality spatially registered vertical temporal filtering for deinterlacing

In this paper, we propose a high quality deinterlacing method using vertical temporal filtering with spatial registration. Vertical temporal filtering methods generally perform well with low levels of complexity. However, they may also produce visible artifacts in moving scenes since incorrect blocks can be used from adjacent fields. By applying global spatial registration before performing vertical temporal filtering, we reduced these deinterlacing errors. To compute the global motion vector, we used a small number of pixels to reduce the computational complexity. However, this global spatial registration sometimes produced artifacts in stationary areas. To solve this problem, we selectively used the conventional vertical temporal filtering method and the spatially registered vertical temporal filtering method. We conducted experiments using CIF and HD progressive video sequences, some of which contained fast motion scenes. Experimental results show that the proposed method noticeably improved video quality in terms of subjective and objective evaluations. The proposed method showed 2-7 dB improvement in terms of PSNR compared to existing methods in fast moving video sequences.