Abstract: Motion-compensated interpolation has several applications in digital image processing like field frequency conversion of different television standards, image coding with the frame skipping method, and so on. Differing from a motion-compensated (MC) predictive algorithm which aims to minimize the prediction errors that must be coded and transmitted, the motion estimator for MC interpolation must provide reliable motion vectorfields which closely approximate the actual motions in scenes in order to reconstruct the missed images in the receiver end. Generally speaking, motion vectorfields obtained by the conventional motion estimation algorithms are not good enough for the application of MC interpolation. In this paper, a new motion estimation algorithm including smoothness constraints is proposed, and its application to MC interpolation of skipped images in the environment of a low bit-rate codec is investigated. The simulation results show that motion vectorfields obtained by the proposed motion estimation algorithm are more homogeneous and more reliable than those obtained by the conventional algorithms, and the quality of interpolated images is substantially improved for the examined sequence. !8
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