Frame-rate up-conversion using transmitted true motion vectors

In this paper, we present a video frame-rate up-conversion scheme that uses transmitted true motion vectors for motion-compensated interpolation. In a past work, we demonstrated that a neighborhood-relaxation motion tracker can provide more accurate true motion information than a conventional minimal-residue block-matching algorithm. Although the technique to estimate the true motion vectors is a novelty in its own right, the strength of this technique can be further demonstrated through various spatio-temporal interpolation applications. In this work, we focus on the particular problem of frame-rate up-conversion. In the proposed scheme, the true motion field is derived by the encoder and transmitted by normal means (e.g., MPEG or H.263 encoding). Then, it is recovered by the decoder and is used not only for motion compensated predictions but also used to reconstruct missing data. It is shown that the use of our neighborhood-relaxation motion estimation provides a method of constructing high quality image sequences in a practical manner