Robust motion-compensated video upconversion

The quality of field-rate conversion improves significantly with motion-compensation techniques. It becomes possible to interpolate new fields at their correct temporal position. This results in smooth motion portrayal without loss of temporal resolution. However, motion vectors are not always valid for every pixel or object in an image. Therefore, visible artifacts occur wherever such wrong vectors are used on the image. One effective method to solve this problem is the use of non-linear filtering. In this method, a wrongly interpolated pixel is either substituted or averaged with neighbouring pixels. We introduce and evaluate a new and very robust upconversion algorithm which is based on the non-linear filtering approach. It is unique in that it estimates motion vector reliability and uses this information to control the filtering process. This algorithm outperforms others in its class, especially when we have complex image sequences.