Hybrid Warping Fusion for Video Frame Interpolation

Video frame interpolation aims to synthesize new intermediate frames between existing ones, which is an important task in video enhancement. A classic direction in this field is flow-based which estimates motions in the form of optical flow, warps the frames, and synthesizes the final results. In this work, we explicitly investigate the warping step and propose a way to combine the strength from using both forward and backward warping. Our method, named HWFI, introduces hybrid warping fusion for frame interpolation. We also include edge information explicitly in our pipeline and employ channel attention in our synthesis network. Compared to the latest state-of-the-art method that only uses forward warping, our method produces better results with higher quality, especially in edge regions. Extensive experiments show that our method can obtain the best results qualitatively and quantitatively on multiple benchmark datasets.