Frame Rate Up-Conversion Using Linear Quadratic Motion Estimation and Trilateral Filtering Motion Smoothing

Abstract

Frame rate up-conversion (FRUC) is a widely used technique to enhance the visual quality of low frame rate video presented on liquid crystal displays. One decisive factor for an effective FRUC algorithm is to obtain true motion vectors (MVs) for motion compensated interpolation. However, many current block-based motion estimation methods cannot always provide reliable MVs. In this paper, a new FRUC algorithm employing linear quadratic motion estimation and trilateral filtering motion smoothing is presented to estimate true MVs. The MV obtained by minimizing matching error is modeled as the measurement of true MV with noise. To remove the noise, the measured MV is updated with the corresponding predicted MV by using linear quadratic estimation. In motion smoothing stage, a trilateral filter which considers local smoothness, neighboring motion reliability as well as motion diversity at motion boundary, is used to further improve the accuracy and density of motion vector field (MVF). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional FRUC algorithms with better objective and subjective image quality.