Enhanced Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation

Recently, the demand for high-quality video content has rapidly been increasing, led by the development of network technology and the growth in video streaming platforms. In particular, displays with a high refresh rate, such as 120 Hz, have become popular. However, the visual quality is only enhanced if the video stream is produced at the same high frame rate. For the high quality, conventional videos with a low frame rate should be converted into a high frame rate in real time. This paper introduces a bidirectional intermediate flow estimation method for real-time video frame interpolation. A bidirectional intermediate optical flow is directly estimated to predict an accurate intermediate frame. For real-time processing, multiple frames are interpolated with a single intermediate optical flow and parts of the network are implemented in 16-bit floating-point precision. Perceptual loss is also applied to improve the cognitive performance of the interpolated frames. The experimental results showed a high prediction accuracy of 35.54 dB on the Vimeo90K triplet benchmark dataset. The interpolation speed of 84 fps was achieved for 480p resolution.