METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR INCREASING VIDEO FRAME RATE

Synthesizing of video frames that have been dropped by a video encoder is achieved by interpolating between decoded frames at a decoder. The method consists of successive refinement stages that increase in computational complexity. Starting with a spatio-temporal median filtering approach, each stage uses information that improves the quality of the interpolated frames, such as bit stream motion information, decoder-based motion estimation and motion-based state segmentation of regions. By using more computational resources, each of these stages results in an improved quality of interpolated video. The motion compensation techniques are based on block-based motion estimation of the kind used by block-transform based video encoders. More accurate motion estimates are obtained by using a combination of forward and backward block motion estimation. The method is further extended by incorporating global/local motion estimation based on the segmentation information, and employing image warping techniques to compensate for motion resulting from deformations.