Temporally consistent high frame-rate upsampling with motion sparsification

This paper continues our work on occlusion-aware temporal frame interpolation (TFI) that employs piecewise-smooth motion with sharp motion boundaries. In this work, we propose a triangular mesh sparsification algorithm, which allows to trade off computational complexity with reconstruction quality. Furthermore, we propose a method to create a background motion layer in regions that get disoccluded between the two reference frames, which is used to get temporally consistent interpolations among frames interpolated between the two reference frames. Experimental results on a large data set show the proposed mesh sparsification is able to reduce the processing time by 75%, with a minor drop in PSNR of 0.02 dB. The proposed TFI scheme outperforms various state-of-the-art TFI methods in terms of quality of the interpolated frames, while having the lowest processing times. Further experiments on challenging synthetic sequences highlight the temporal consistency in traditionally difficult regions of disocclusion.