Motion compensated frame interpolation by new block-based motion estimation algorithm

In this paper, a motion compensated frame interpolation (MCI) algorithm adapting new block-based motion estimation (BME), which is overlapped block-based motion estimation (OBME), is proposed for frame rate upconversion (FRC). Unlike conventional BME algorithms, where a video frame is divided into many non-overlapping square blocks of pixels, the proposed BME is executed using an overlapped matching block in order to get more accurate motion trajectory. To reduce computational complexity caused by the OBME, a sub-sampled pixel block is used for the OBME. The proposed OBME is executed with the various overlapped blocks that have different block sizes and sub-sampling ratios. In this paper, instead of mean absolute difference (MAD) used for general BME, a modified MAD is applied for the OBME. The MAD proposed is weighted using the magnitude of MV that corresponds to the estimating position. From the simulation results, the proposed methods show better performance in estimating "true motion" and reducing blocking artifacts with less complexity in calculation compared to a conventional method.