An adaptive true motion estimation algorithm for frame rate conversion of high definition video and its hardware implementations

Frame Rate Up-Conversion (FRUC) is required for displaying low frame rate video signals on high frame rate flat panel displays. In this paper, we propose an adaptive true Motion Estimation (ME) algorithm for FRUC of High Definition (HD) video. The proposed ME algorithm produces similar quality results with less number of calculations or higher quality results with similar number of calculations compared to 3D Recursive Search true ME algorithm by adaptively using optimized sets of candidate search locations and several computational complexity reduction techniques. We also propose two different complexity hardware architectures for implementing this ME algorithm. The second hardware uses an efficient data re-use technique for reducing the number of off-chip memory accesses. We implemented both hardware architectures in Verilog HDL. The hardware implementations are capable of processing 158 and 168 720p HD frames per second on average respectively. Therefore, they can be used in consumer electronics products that require real-time FRUC of HD video.