An Efficient Motion-Compensated Frame Interpolation Method Using Temporal Information for High-Resolution Videos

High-resolution (HR) videos have many different properties from low-resolution videos in terms of motion vectors (MVs) and occlusions. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an optimized motion-compensated frame interpolation (MCFI) method for HR videos. This paper proposes an MCFI method for HR videos that uses a hierarchical motion estimation composed of a modified 3-D recursive search and motion refinement using temporal MV smoothness. In addition, a robust frame interpolation method is proposed that assigns accurate MVs to the intermediate frame. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method outperforms previous MCFI methods in terms of the quality of the intermediate frames.