Occlusion handling frame rate up-conversion

Motion-compensated frame interpolation (MCFI) is a technique used extensively to enhance the temporal resolution of video sequences. In order to obtain a high quality interpolation, the motion vector field (MVF) between frames must be well-estimated. However, many current techniques for determining the MVF are prone to errors in occlusion regions. In this work, we propose an improved algorithm for improving the quality of MCFI by restoring the unreliable MVF and pixels in occlusion regions. We first utilize a dual motion estimation (DME) scheme which performs better in occlusion regions. Occlusion regions are determined by the ratio of two directional matching errors. Then, MVs in occlusion regions are refined using an orientation-based refinement (OBR) method, which promotes occluded MVs with its orthogonal neighboring MVF. Finally, regional blending (RB) is proposed to restore the unreliable pixels in occlusion regions for further error concealment. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides a better quality than previous benchmark frame rate up-conversion (FRUC) methods both objectively and subjectively.