Frame rate up-conversion using nonparametric estimator

In some applications such as digital video broadcasting, video is transmitted over a low capacity channel with lower frame rates. The lower the frame rate, the jerkier or unevener the video motion would be noticed. To solve this problem, frame rate up conversion (FRUC) is employed to increase the frame rate. In this paper, we propose a new FRUC method using the nonlocal-means estimator. In this method, a pixel is reconstructed as a weighted linear combination of pixel pairs in its adjacent frames. The pixels of each pair are temporally symmetric from the view point of the pixel being interpolated. The weights are calculated based on the self-similarity assumption. To reduce the computational complexity, we calculate the weights of linear combination for each super-pixel. Experimental results show the superior performance of our proposed method in comparison to the existing methods.