Given two consecutive frames, video interpolation aims at generating intermediate frame(s) to form both spatially and temporally coherent video sequences. While most existing methods focus on single-frame interpolation, we propose an end-to-end convolutional neural network for variable-length multi-frame video interpolation, where the motion interpretation and occlusion reasoning are jointly modeled. We start by computing bi-directional optical flow between the input images using a U-Net architecture. These flows are then linearly combined at each time step to approximate the intermediate bi-directional optical flows. These approximate flows, however, only work well in locally smooth regions and produce artifacts around motion boundaries. To address this shortcoming, we employ another U-Net to refine the approximated flow and also predict soft visibility maps. Finally, the two input images are warped and linearly fused to form each intermediate frame. By applying the visibility maps to the warped images before fusion, we exclude the contribution of occluded pixels to the interpolated intermediate frame to avoid artifacts. Since none of our learned network parameters are time-dependent, our approach is able to produce as many intermediate frames as needed. We use 1,132 video clips with 240-fps, containing 300K individual video frames, to train our network. Experimental results on several datasets, predicting different numbers of interpolated frames, demonstrate that our approach performs consistently better than existing methods.
The success of deep learning in high-level vision tasks has inspired numerous deep models for low-level vision tasks, including frame interpolation. Long al @cite_6 use frame interpolation as a supervision signal to learn CNN models for optical flow. However, their main target is optical flow and the interpolated frames tend to be blurry. Niklaus al @cite_32 consider the frame interpolation as a local convolution over the two input frames and use a CNN to learn a spatially-adaptive convolution kernel for each pixel. Their method obtains high-quality results. However, it is both computationally expensive and memory intensive to predict a kernel for every pixel. Niklaus al @cite_17 improve the efficiency by predicting separable kernels. But the motion that can be handled is limited by the kernel size (up to 51 pixels). Liu al @cite_14 develop a CNN model for frame interpolation that has an explicit sub-network for motion estimation. Their method obtains not only good interpolation results but also promising unsupervised flow estimation results on KITTI 2012. However, as discussed previously, these CNN-based single-frame interpolation methods @cite_32 @cite_17 @cite_14 are not well-suited for multi-frame interpolation.
@cite_14 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_17
2604329646 2305401973 2742605348
Video frame interpolation typically involves two steps: motion estimation and pixel synthesis. Such a two-step approach heavily depends on the quality of motion estimation. This paper presents a robust video frame interpolation method that combines these two steps into a single process. Specifically, our method considers pixel synthesis for the interpolated frame as local convolution over two input frames. The convolution kernel captures both the local motion between the input frames and the coefficients for pixel synthesis. Our method employs a deep fully convolutional neural network to estimate a spatially-adaptive convolution kernel for each pixel. This deep neural network can be directly trained end to end using widely available video data without any difficult-to-obtain ground-truth data like optical flow. Our experiments show that the formulation of video interpolation as a single convolution process allows our method to gracefully handle challenges like occlusion, blur, and abrupt brightness change and enables high-quality video frame interpolation. This work presents an unsupervised learning based approach to the ubiquitous computer vision problem of image matching. We start from the insight that the problem of frame interpolation implicitly solves for inter-frame correspondences. This permits the application of analysis-by-synthesis: we first train and apply a Convolutional Neural Network for frame interpolation, then obtain correspondences by inverting the learned CNN. The key benefit behind this strategy is that the CNN for frame interpolation can be trained in an unsupervised manner by exploiting the temporal coherence that is naturally contained in real-world video sequences. The present model therefore learns image matching by simply “watching videos”. Besides a promise to be more generally applicable, the presented approach achieves surprising performance comparable to traditional empirically designed methods. Standard video frame interpolation methods first estimate optical flow between input frames and then synthesize an intermediate frame guided by motion. Recent approaches merge these two steps into a single convolution process by convolving input frames with spatially adaptive kernels that account for motion and re-sampling simultaneously. These methods require large kernels to handle large motion, which limits the number of pixels whose kernels can be estimated at once due to the large memory demand. To address this problem, this paper formulates frame interpolation as local separable convolution over input frames using pairs of 1D kernels. Compared to regular 2D kernels, the 1D kernels require significantly fewer parameters to be estimated. Our method develops a deep fully convolutional neural network that takes two input frames and estimates pairs of 1D kernels for all pixels simultaneously. Since our method is able to estimate kernels and synthesizes the whole video frame at once, it allows for the incorporation of perceptual loss to train the neural network to produce visually pleasing frames. This deep neural network is trained end-to-end using widely available video data without any human annotation. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method provides a practical solution to high-quality video frame interpolation.