True motion estimation for video frame rate up-conversion

Since the invention of high definition display technologies, video standards con-version problem has become an important task to store, transmit and displaynew video formats. One of the standards conversion issue, video frame rateup-conversion(FRUC) should be considered as an important problem for highdefinition displays because these displays reach high refresh rates up to 100Hzand low video frame rates should be increased before displaying. The solutionsgenerated by conventional FRUC techniques cause artifacts such as jerky motionand judder effect on the screen. The objective of this thesis is to remove judderand occlusion artifacts and generate a smooth object motion for high definitiondisplays. In order to solve the problem, this thesis describes a multi-stage motionvector (MV) post-processing technique for true motion estimation and proposesa new video frame rate up-conversion method with occlusion adaptive overlappedblock motion compensation, which increases the temporal resolution without lossof spatial resolution and consistency. Conventional block matching algorithmsyields us unreliable MVs which should be post-processed in the refinement stagesto get a consistent MV field in spatial domain . Relations between neighboringMVs are utilized to detect occlusion regions. Overlapped Block Motion Compen-sation (OBMC) is adapted to these problematic regions in order to reduce haloartifacts caused by occlusion. Compared to existing methods, the proposed algo-rithm achieves FRUC with reduced loss of spatial resolution and reduced amountof artifacts.