MOTION COMPENSATED IMAGE INTERPOLATION

Field skipping is a viable technique to reduce drastically the bit rate necessary to transmit a television signal. All fields have to be reconstructed at the receiver end, but nearest neighbor or linear interpolations give poor performances when significant scene activity is present; therefore, some motion compensation scheme is mandatory. Although anyone of the algorithms proposed for motion estimation can be used for motion compensated interpolation, in this paper the authors consider the pel-recursive algorithm they have proposed [12], Past experience is briefly summarized and, based on criticism, improvements to the basic algorithm are proposed that seem to lead to an estimated motion field accurate enough. Multiple recursions and appropriate selection rules are proposed to counteract “streaking effects” of the recursive algorithm when it crosses image boundaries. The estimation of a “forward” and of a “backward” motion field is used to identify image areas where occlusion effects are present. Experimental results are presented that seem to indicate a good performance of the proposed interpolation scheme. © 1990 IEEE