Method and apparatus for the detection and classification of occlusion regions

In frame rate up-conversion for video signals interpolated frames are inserted within the video stream to increase the frame rate for display. Halo effects, observed as ghost replicas, can occur in occlusion regions around the boundaries of moving objects. To enable the occlusion regions to be compensated, they are detected by a method utilizing forward, backward and bidirectional motion vectors for each of a first frame (100), a second frame (104) and an interpolated frame (102). Occlusion regions (106,108) are located by comparing bidirectional motion vectors with forward or backward motion vectors to find inconsistencies. Then blocks of pixels having bi directional motion vectors (112,114) can be compensated unidirectionally by using the pixel information (220,224) in one of the original frames (100,102).