Work Accomplished

We began by studying the papers listed in the References section below. It was noted that Motion Compensated Frame Interplation (MCFI) was preferred over Optical Flow and Pel-Recursive methods due to its lower computational requirements and decent performance. Three MCFI methodologies were implemented in VC++ on the Windows NT platform. It was found that MCFI using Bidirectional Motion Estimation [1] and MCFI using using a pixel classifier [2] required roughly the same computational power and yielded very similar results. The pixel classification method was found to yeild a slightly higher PSNR for the Mobile and Akiyo sequences, but a lower PSNR for Stefan. The pixel classification method should work quite well for talking head sequences.

In addition to implementing the two methods mentioned above, a MCFI alorithm that utilized only backward motion vectors was implemented. (as opposed to using just both forward and backward motion vectors in the other two methods). This method can take advantage of the backward motion vectors already coded in MPEG video sequences, so motion estimation calculations do not have to be redone. Unfortunately, the PSNR of this method is quite low and many artifacts are produces, so this method is not practical.