Quality-Controlled Motion-Compensated Interpolation

Low-complexity video encoding is important for mobile and power-sensitive applications. One way to reduce encoding complexity is to drop frames at the encoder and perform motion-compensated frame interpolation at the decoder. We propose a method to estimate the quality of the interpolated frames at the decoder by transmitting a small amount of error control information in lieu of an omitted frame. Typically, this information is obtained from a projection of the frame on a suitable low-dimensional basis. The projection coefficients can be compressed by conventional techniques or, more efficiently, by Slepian-Wolf coding. Based on the quality estimate, the decoder can recognize and suppress occasional frames for which motion-compensated interpolation does not yield satisfactory picture quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach eliminates most interpolation artifacts and achieves much better visual quality at a negligible increase in bit-rate.