Luminance Compensation MEMC for Video Frame Interpolation

Video frame interpolation is an important technology in digital video processing, which has great impact on users’ viewing experience. In particular, in medical or industrial application scenarios, the accuracy of the frame interpolation algorithm may also influence the diagnosis results. In addition, for videos based on ionizing radiation (e.g., X-rays), each frame exposure could cause damage to human tissues by ionizing radiation. Therefore, if a frame interpolation algorithm is introduced to display the same number of frames, it only needs to sample half of the frames and halve the exposure radiation doses, which is statistically promising to reduce human cancer rate caused by ionizing radiations (e.g., medical examinations). However, since there are errors in frame interpolation caused by luminance leap, existing works are not applicable in such scenarios. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a video interpolation algorithm based on luminance compensation MEMC (LC-MEMC). Firstly, a luminance compensation method based on the electromagnetic irradiation attenuation in human tissue is introduced to improve the performance of motion estimation and motion compensation (MEMC) and reduce matching errors caused by luminance leap. Secondly, LC-MEMC proposes an improved block matching approach, including i) a new search method from basic points to local points and ii) a block matching criterion that simplifies the calculation process. LC-MEMC improves the accuracy and processing speed of video interpolation from three perspectives: adding luminance compensation, improving the search strategy and optimizing the matching degree calculation method for each search position. We evaluated LC-MEMC on collected medical videos and achieved higher accuracy, faster processing speed, and significantly better viewing experience comparing with existing methods.