Blocking-artifact detection in frequency domain for frame-rate up-conversion

In this paper, a blocking-artifact detection method is proposed for motion-compensated frame-rate up-conversion (MC-FRUC) algorithms. In the MC-FRUC process, most of the notable blocking artifacts occur in unreliable motion-compensated regions. To find the unreliable motion-compensated regions, an occlusion detection (OD) method for which the neighboring motion vectors are used is applied. If an occlusion occurs, then the use of median filtering reduces any inappropriate motion-compensated errors; otherwise, the normal motion compensated interpolation (MCI) is applied. In addition, to reduce the occurrence of the blocking artifacts in the MC-FRUC algorithms, a blocking-artifact-reduction method for which the blocking-artifact strength in the frequency domain is applied to the occluded regions is utilized. The experiment results show that the proposed method shows more-favorable peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values compared with those of the conventional FRUC algorithms regarding full-HD (1920 × 1080) and WQXGA (2560 × 1600) sequences.