Artifact reduction in occluded regions for motion compensated frame interpolation

In this paper, we propose a new method to be used in occluded regions for motion compensated frame interpolation. Frame rate up conversion is becoming much more important when usage of digital video systems increase. Standard conversion techniques are not effective in increasing the temporal resolution of video without any degradation. Therefore, motion compensated post processing techniques are developed to obtain the best possible image at the receiver. Specifying the correct or reliable motion vectors is the most important issue to be able to prevent the artifacts and deformed structures in interpolated frames. There are many methods in literature developed for that purpose. However, these methods generally create annoying artifacts in interpolated frames. Significantly, they can not provide acceptable results for covered and uncovered regions. In our work, we build upon the successful multi-stage post processing method which is used to obtain the correct vector for motion compensated frame interpolation. According to our analysis, all these post processing stages are effective to specify the reliable motion vectors, but they are not sufficient to solve the problem in covered and uncovered regions. In thesis, we suggest methods to be able to solve the problem occurring in these regions. In most of the adaptive methods, either past or future frames are used for interpolation in covered/uncovered regions, respectively, but in our proposals we interpolate the new frame by using a weighted combination of the four neighboring frames to minimize the sharp blocking artifacts that occur because of uni-directional interpolation in occluded regions. Experimental results show that our proposed method is robust in occluded areas, and reduces the sharp artifacts in the interpolated frame for covered and uncovered regions, and provides better picture quality.