METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR INVERSE TELECINE PROCESSING BY FITTING PULL- DOWN PATTERNS

The invention provides methods and apparatus for performing inverse telecine processing on an input video frame sequence to be encoded. A method well-suited for detelecine of film-only telecine in MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 applications includes the steps of attempting to fit known 3:2 pulldown pattern phases to the entire sequence, determining a likely edit point in the sequence if a known phase cannot be fit to the sequence, and recursively repeating the fitting and edit point determination steps on subsequences until the entire sequence is partitioned into subsequences which can be fit with one of the known phases. The phases fit to the sequence or subsequences are then used to generate field-match indicators which are further processed to generate MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 compliant repeat field codes.