A novel frame rate up conversion using iterative non-local means interpolation

A novel motion-compensated frame rate up conversion algorithm is proposed in this paper, which employs the iterative non-local means (NLM) interpolation. Firstly, we obtain the forward and backward motion vector fields (MVFs) by optical flow estimation. Then in order to reduce the cracks and salt-and-pepper noise, the initial interpolated frame is reconstructed by the fusion of these two MVFs in block-based interpolation. After that an iterative non-local means interpolation is proposed, where the MVFs and intermediate frame are refined alternatively in each iteration. This iterative procedure can alleviate the artifacts and preserve the texture effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in both objective and subjective quality.