N A T A N J A C O B S O N
Graduate Student Researcher
Video Processing Lab
ECE @ UCSD


Motion Vector Refinement for FRUC using Saliency and Segmentation
N. Jacobson, Y.-L. Lee, V. Mahadevan, N. Vasconcelos, T.Q. Nguyen
2010 IEEE Int. Conf. Multimedia and Expo, pp. 778-783, 19-23 Jul. 2010

Motion-Compensated Frame Interpolation (MCFI) is a technique used extensively for increasing the temporal frequency of a video sequence. In order to obtain a high quality interpolation, the motion field between frames must be well-estimated. However, many current techniques for determining the motion are prone to errors in occlusion regions, as well as regions with repetitive structure. An algorithm is proposed for improving both the objective and subjective quality of MCFI by refining the motion vector field. A Discriminant Saliency classifier is employed to determine regions of the motion field which are most important to a human observer. These regions are refined using a multi-stage motion vector refinement which promotes candidates based on their likelihood given a local neighborhood. For regions which fall below the saliency threshold, frame segmentation is used to locate regions of homogeneous color and texture via Normalized Cuts. Motion vectors are promoted such that each homogeneous region has a consistent motion. Experimental results demonstrate an improvement over previous methods in both objective and subjective picture quality

Original Image
3DRS Full Search
MSEA Proposed

Subjective Results
Sequence Method Std. Dev. Rej. Region Average Score
Planes
720p
Prop vs. 3DRS 0.55 0.21 2.24
Prop vs. FS 1.26 0.49 1.11
Prop vs. MSEA 0.77 0.30 1.48
Speedway
720p
Prop vs. 3DRS 0.30 0.12 2.81
Prop vs. FS 0.99 0.38 0.78
Prop vs. MSEA 1.15 0.44 0.85
Football
CIF
Prop vs. 3DRS 0.50 0.19 2.34
Prop vs. FS 1.02 0.39 0.21
Prop vs. MSEA 0.74 0.29 -0.15
Tennis
CIF
Prop vs. 3DRS 1.22 0.47 1.51
Prop vs. FS 0.51 0.20 0.21
Prop vs. MSEA 0.86 0.33 0.26

Objective Results
720p Sequence Metric 3DRS FS MSEA MMVP Proposed
Dolphin PSNR 30.6850 31.8903 31.8539 31.6042 31.9006
SSIM 0.9417 0.9504 0.9511 0.9497 0.9537
Limit PSNR 37.5492 38.2784 38.5500 38.2704 38.6604
SSIM 0.9855 0.9866 0.9871 0.9866 0.9876
Planes PSNR 36.6685 37.1436 37.2119 37.1292 38.2912
SSIM 0.9940 0.9950 0.9950 0.9944 0.9952
Speedway PSNR 25.7847 26.6485 26.6092 26.6632 26.6846
SSIM 0.9335 0.9407 0.9404 0.9408 0.9411
CIF Sequence Metric 3DRS FS MSEA MMVP Proposed
Coastguard PSNR 32.4071 33.8265 33.8948 33.7229 34.8572
SSIM 0.9833 0.9866 0.9868 0.9858 0.9893
Football PSNR 23.0517 23.8816 23.9127 22.5563 24.2448
SSIM 0.9441 0.9511 0.9513 0.9334 0.9571
Foreman PSNR 36.1712 37.5657 37.6198 36.4874 37.6827
SSIM 0.9869 0.9904 0.9905 0.9883 0.9911
Tennis PSNR 29.7027 30.7389 30.6444 27.3591 31.3106
SSIM 0.9667 0.9664 0.9666 0.9430 0.9733