Mark Jozef Willem Mertens

Motion vector field improvement for picture rate conversion with reduced halo

The quality of the interpolated images in picture rate upconversion is predominantly dependent on the accuracy of the motion vector fields. Block based MEs typically yield incorrect vectors in occlusion areas, which leads to an annoying halo in the upconverted video sequences. In the past we have developed a cost-effective block based motion estimator, the 3D Recursive Search ME, and an improved accuracy version for tackling occlusion, the tritemporal ME. In this article we describe how the vector field from this tritemporal ME is further improved by a retimer, using information from a foreground/background detector. More accurate motion vector fields are of importance to other applications also (e.g. video compression, 3D, scene analysis ...).