A novel content adaptive search strategy for low complexity frame rate up conversion

Frame rate up-conversion (FRUC) is an important technique for various film/video conversions, and technology displays due to its benefits in both increasing the viewing quality experiences and reducing the cost of video transmission. However, with the growing of video resolutions and the exceeding of computation associated to the motion estimation (ME), FRUC is hardly suitable for real-time video applications. In this context, we propose a novel ME search strategy for low complexity, yet effective FRUC framework. In the proposed FRUC framework, the search strategy, one of the major aspects which directly influences to the FRUC processing time as well as the interpolated frame quality, is adaptively driven by the video content. Both temporal and spatial activities are considered to adjust the number of searching points according to the minimum of mean absolute difference (MAD) between current and reference blocks. Experimental results conducted for a rich set of video sequences shown the advantages of the proposed FRUC scheme, notably in both interpolated frame quality and time processing when comparing to relevant benchmarks.