Motion-compensated interpolation for low-bit-rate video quality enhancement

Fast motion-compensated frame interpolation (FMCI) schemes for the decoder of the block-based video codec operating in low bit rates are examined in this paper. The main objective is to improve the video quality by increasing the frame rate without a substantial increase in the computational complexity. Two FMCI schemes are proposed depending on the motion vector mapping strategy, i.e. the non-deformable and the deformable block-based FMCI schemes. They provide a trade-off of the computational complexity and the visual performance. With proposed schemes, the decoder can perform frame interpolation using motion information received from the encoder. The complexity of FMCI is reduced since no additional motion search in the decoder is needed as required by standard MCI. It has been observed from experimental results that the visual quality of coded low-bit-rate video is significantly improved at the expense of a small increase indecoder's complexity.