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IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 56, No. 2, May 2010

Enhanced Frame Rate Up-Conversion Method

for UHD Video
Tae-Shick Wang, Kang-Sun Choi, Member, IEEE, Hyung-Seok Jang,
Aldo W. Morales, Senior Member, IEEE, and Sung-Jea Ko, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract In this paper, a segment-based motion

estimation (ME) method for frame rate up-conversion is
proposed that can achieve better visual quality for next
generation video formats. The proposed ME method can
reduce the computational complexity of the ME drastically by
adjusting the search range (SR) for each segment and
adopting a new efficient distortion criterion, called the subsampled sum of absolute differences (SSAD). The proposed
method does not degrade the motion accuracy by using the
temporal consistency of the segment with large size.
Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm
outperforms conventional methods both objectively and
subjectively with the significantly reduced computational
complexity1.
Index Terms Frame rate up-conversion, true motion
estimation, block-based segmentation, low complexity, ultra high
definition.

I. INTRODUCTION
With the dramatic growth for large-size liquid crystal
display (LCD) devices among commercial and end users,
delivering a higher quality of viewing experience (QoE) to the
users becomes more significantly competitive advantage in the
marketplace. Recently, ultra high definition (UHD) which
provides the four to sixteen times higher resolution than high
definition (HD) is being investigated as a next generation
video format.
However, since the motion blur caused by inherent
characteristic of LCD still remains [1], reduction of the blur
can provide viewers with a strong sense of satisfaction as
shown in Fig. 1. In order to alleviate the motion blur, various
frame rate up-conversion (FRUC) methods have been
developed and successfully employed [2]-[11].
In most FRUC methods, motion compensated frame
interpolation (MCFI) is employed to accurately generate an
interpolated frame by considering the object movement.
Generally, MCFI methods consist of motion estimation (ME)
and motion-compensated interpolation (MCI).
1
This research was supported by Seoul Future Contents Convergence
(SFCC) Cluster established by Seoul R&BD Program (No. 10570). This work
was supported by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation(KOSEF)
grant funded by the Korea government(MEST) (No. 2009-0080547)
T.-S. Wang, K.-S. Choi, H.-S. Jang, and S.-J. Ko are with the School of
Electrical Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea, 136-701 (e-mail:
kschoi@dali.korea.ac.kr, sjko@korea.ac.kr).
A. W. Morales is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Penn
State University, Harrisburg, PA 17057, USA (e-mail: awm2@psu.edu).

Manuscript received April 15, 2010

Current version published 06 29 2010;
Electronic version published 07 06 2010.

Fig. 1. Comparison of QoEs both with and without FRUC.

The motion vector field (MVF) is estimated between two

successive frames, and then the interpolated frame is obtained
by merging the frames based on the MVF.
In the MCFI, the MVF should represent the actual object
motion. More precisely, the MVF should be smooth within
each object and discontinuous between objects of different
motion. These requirements are different from those for
applications of video compression, where the estimation
minimizes the energy of the displaced frame difference. Block
matching algorithm (BMA) widely used for video
compression cannot produce true motion vectors (MVs)
especially when the block is very small with respect to the
frame size. In this case, the discontinuity among the MVs
belonging to one object causes blocking artifacts. On the
contrary, if the block is large and spans objects of different
motion, ghost artifacts are produced due to inaccurate MVs
estimated by BMA.
Several ME methods for MCFI have been proposed to find
the true motion trajectories based on BMA [2]-[4]. In [2], they
assumed that that the block with large size gives a more
correct motion trajectory. Based on the assumption,
overlapped matching block is used to get more accurate MVF.
However, when the overlapped block spans multiple objects
of different motion, an unreliable MV is obtained. A multisize BMA method was presented in [3], where the block size
is adaptively determined depending on the similarity of the

0098 3063/10/$20.00 2010 IEEE

T.-S. Wang et al.: Enhanced Frame Rate Up-Conversion Method for UHD Video

MVs obtained in the previous frame. However, these ME

methods cannot be directly employed for real-time FRUC
applications for UHD video due to a drastic increase in
computational complexity.
For MCI, bi-directional MCI using overlapped block
motion compensation (OBMC) has been widely utilized since
OBMC has been proved to be an effective method in reducing
blocking artifact [5]-[12]. To improve the performance of
OBMC, several modified versions have been presented [8],[9].
In FRUC applications, smoothing effect caused by OBMC
produces pleasing results along object boundaries. Since the
performance of the MCFI highly depends on the accuracy of
the MVF, in this paper, we focus on the true ME and our
previous MCI method in [6] is utilized for the MCI.
To cope with the problems in both computational
complexity and visual quality, we propose a novel FRUC
method which achieves better visual quality with an efficient
MCFI algorithm for next generation video formats. In order to
obtain the true motion with low complexity, a segment-based
ME method is proposed, where each segment consists of the
blocks with identical image pattern. Before the MV of each
segment is actually estimated, we predict the reliability of the
MV to be obtained for each segment by exploiting the
characteristics of the segment such as size and temporal
consistency. Then, the MVs of the segments with high
reliability are first determined and propagated to the
neighboring segments.
In the proposed algorithm, both search range (SR)
adaptation and subsampled sum of absolute differences
(SSAD) are utilized for reducing the computational
complexity of the ME significantly. However, since the SR
adaptation and SSAD are controlled appropriately based on
the characteristics of the segment, the true motion can be
obtained without the accuracy degradation.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section II,
we analyze the characteristics of motion information obtained
by conventional full search based (FS) ME method and
discuss the ME scheme for obtaining the true motion. In
Section III, based on the motion analysis results, we propose a
segment-based ME method. Experimental results for the
proposed algorithm and conclusions are given in Section IV
and V, respectively.
II. MOTION ANALYSIS FOR UHD VIDEO
Fig. 2 illustrates the statistics including mean, variance, and
maximum values of the actual object movement between
successive frames in various video sequences of different
resolutions. It is apparent from Fig. 2 that a larger SR, in
proportion to the increase of the image size, is required to
accurately estimate the objects movements. However, simple
SR enlargement cannot effectively improve the accuracy of
the motion obtained by the FS BMA, since the enlarged SR
can span regions which belong to another object but are more
similar to the current block.

1109

Fig. 2. The statistical characteristic of the object movement between

successive frames.

TABLE I
THE AVERAGE ORDER OF THE TRUE MOTION FOR DIFFERENT SRS
SRs

Block
Size

r 32

r 64

r 96

r 128

r 256
2076.2

109.5

540.4

562.7

766.8

16

6.7

9.3

13.7

22.9

61.9

32

4.6

6.6

7.0

10.3

35.2

In order to evaluate the accuracy of the motion information

obtained by the FS BMA for different SR sizes, we sorted all
the MV candidates within the SR for each block in a UHD
video frame in an increasing order of sum of absolute
differences (SAD) and obtained the average order of the MV
representing the true motion which is identified manually. In
order to compensate for the accuracy of the manually obtained
true motion, not only the manually obtained MV but also its
eight neighboring MVs are considered for the true motion. As
a result, among the nine MVs, the one with the lowest order is
selected to get the order of the true motion. As the average
order of the true motion increases, the FS BMA tends to
produce an inaccurate MV which is very different from the
true motion.
As summarized in Table I, the accuracy of the obtained MV
is degraded drastically by enlarging the SR. In order to exploit
both contradictory experimental results consistently, the SR
size should be kept as small as possible if a reliable MV is
initially given. Note that enlarging the block size leads to
improve the accuracy of the obtained MVs. However, if the
block is large enough to include several objects of different
motion, the MV is determined inaccurately as mentioned
above. Consequently, in order to obtain the true motion
accurately, it is required that only the blocks with similar
motion are merged to an entity as many as possible and that
the motion is estimated for the entity.
In the next section, we introduce a segment-based ME
algorithm that divides the frame into several homogeneous
segments and estimates the motion for each segment.

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IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 56, No. 2, May 2010

bi , j

fn

f n 1

Fig. 3. Architecture of the proposed ME algorithm.

G t T1

PP

III. EFFICIENT MOTION ESTIMATION BASED ON BLOCKBASED OBJECT SEGMENTATION

Different homogenous regions always exist in images,
which are usually separated by boundaries consisting of
relatively distinct edge lines. In the video sequences, large
homogenous regions tend to move rigidly between
consecutive frames, whereas boundaries typically undergo
non-rigid deformation. Therefore, we can assume that the
motion of a large homogenous region can be obtained more
reliably. Note that in general the motion ambiguity caused by
the aperture problem is more severe in the small region than
the large one [13].
In this section, we propose a new ME algorithm using
block-based object segmentation to estimate the true motion
accurately. The architecture of the proposed ME scheme is
shown in Fig. 3. The current frame, f n , is partitioned into
several segments each of which contains the blocks with
similar features. Prior to ME for the segments, in the segment
selection, we choose some segments whose motion can be
obtained more reliably based on selection conditions
satisfying the assumption mentioned above. Then, the MVs
for the segments are estimated by three-stage ME in order of
their expected reliability. Specifically, the highly reliable MVs
of large segments are firstly determined by temporal
prediction followed by refinement, and propagated to adjacent
segments. Finally, the MVs of the remaining segments are
determined by using the FS-based ME. In the following subsections, the proposed ME method is described in detail.
A. Object segmentation for true motion estimation
Fig. 4 illustrates the proposed block-based segmentation
algorithm that classifies each block in f n into three classes:
edge, plane, and texture. For each block, bni , the gradient is
calculated by using the Sobel operator [14]. Let G denote the
number of the significant pixels whose gradient magnitude is
larger than a threshold T0 . If G < T1 , bni is classified as "plane".
Otherwise, the gradient direction histogram is generated by
using the four directional symmetric partitions as shown in
Fig. 5 with the gradient angles of the significant pixels.
If the ratio of the largest bin size in the histogram to the
number of the significant pixels, r , is larger than T2 , the block
can have dominant directional edges. In that case, bni is
classified as "edge", otherwise bni has the "texture" pattern.
The "plane", "edge", and "texture" patterns are denoted by PP ,
PE , and PT , respectively.

r ! T2

PT
PE

Fig. 4. Flowchart of the block pattern classification.

3
2

4
1

4
3

Fig. 5. Four directional partitions for the gradient direction histogram.

Then, homogeneous segments are obtained by merging

adjacent blocks with an identical pattern if and only if the
difference of the average intensities of the blocks is less than T3 .
B. Segment selection
In the segment selection, we find segments whose motion
can be obtained accurately. As mentioned above, the motion
of a large homogenous region can be obtained more reliably.
In order to improve both the accuracy and efficiency of the
following ME, the temporal consistency between
corresponding segments is additionally taken into account.
Let S nk denote the k-th segment obtained from f n . First, the
MVF of the previous frame is extrapolated to the current
frame by negating the MVF. Assuming that the MVF of the
previous frame represents true motion trajectories and S nl 1 is
translated to S nk based on the linear motion model, the
extrapolated homogeneous MVs of S nl 1 pass through S nk . Thus,
S nk can be temporally consistent if a dominant MV exists
among the extrapolated MVs passing through S nk . As a result,
the segment with the temporal consistency can be found if the
following three conditions are all satisfied,
1. The pattern of segment S nk should be PP or PT .
2. The number of blocks inside S nk denoted by N B ( Snk )
should be greater than a threshold T4 .
3. S nk should have a dominant MV in a set of the
extrapolated MVs passing through S nk .

T.-S. Wang et al.: Enhanced Frame Rate Up-Conversion Method for UHD Video

1111

In this paper, an MV is considered to be dominant when

over 70% of the extrapolated MVs are identical to the MV.
Note that the temporal consistency verification is
computationally efficient since simple operations such as
negation and counting are performed.

refining the initially predicted MV, LSR , is calculated by

C. Efficient true motion estimation using segmentation

information
In the proposed method, the computational complexity of
the ME can be dramatically reduced by reconfiguring the ME
scheme adaptively based on several characteristics of the
segment.
First, instead of the SAD, the SSAD is proposed for the
block distortion measurement criterion, the computational
complexity of which can be varied as follows:

where H is the low limit of the SR size which is set to 8.

By employing the SSAD and the variable SR size, the
computational complexity of the proposed ME is significantly
decreased without any loss of the accuracy of the ME.
At the first stage of the proposed ME, the MVs for the
segments chosen in the segment selection are estimated firstly,
which are expected to be highly reliable. Since the selected
segments are temporally consistent, the dominant MV
obtained in the segment selection can be utilized for an initial
predicted MV for the segment. The MV for the segment is
determined by refining the initial MV within an SR whose
size is calculated by (4).
The MV of a segment is defined as a valid one if the MV
has been determined before. In the second stage of the
proposed ME, we propagate valid MVs obtained in the first
stage to neighboring segments iteratively, assuming that the
valid MVs are highly reliable.
For the segment whose MV has not been obtained, the
average SSADs are computed with the valid MVs of the
neighboring segments, respectively. If the minimum value
among the average SSADs is less than 5  B V 2 , the
corresponding MV is utilized for the initial predicted MV of
the segment. The MV of the segment is refined with the SR
determined by (4).
At the third stage of the proposed ME, the MVs of the
remaining segments are determined by using the SR of the
maximum size without any predicted MVs. Note that
computational loads can be reduced in SSAD calculation if
the segment is large enough.

SSAD( x, y; MVx , MVy ; V )

(1)

B / V B /V

x1 0

f n ( x2 , y2 )  f n 1 ( x2  MVx , y2  MVy ) ,

y1 0

where
x2

x  V x1

y2

y  V y1 .

(2)

In (1), (x, y) and (MVx, MVy) represent the top left position
and the displacement of a block, respectively. B and V denote
the block size and the sub-sampling rate which can control the
computational complexity of (1), respectively.
Generally, the computational complexity of (1) is much
reduced for large V, while the accuracy of the distortion
measurement is also degraded. In the proposed algorithm,
V varies depending on the segment size. Since many
sample differences are available as for a large segment
even with large Vthe distortion measurement accuracy
can be maintained. In this work, V for the segment S nk is
set to:

16, N B ( S nk ) t 300,

k
4, 30 d N B ( Sn )  300,
k
1,
N B ( S n )  30.

(3)

Secondly, the size of the SR for the refinement is adaptively

determined to reduce computational loads. As shown in Table
I, enlarging the SR can degrade the accuracy of the obtained
MV. If an MV can be predicted with high reliability, an
accurate MV can be obtained by setting a small SR centered at
the predicted MV. To this end, all the SSADs of the blocks in
S nk are initially obtained for the predicted MV. Let
N RB ( Snk ) denote the number of the reliable block whose SSAD
is less than 5  B V 2 . Then, the ratio of N RB ( Snk ) and N B ( Snk )
can indicate the accuracy of the predicted MV. If the predicted
MV is very similar to the actual motion of the segment, the
ratio approaches 1. In the proposed algorithm, the SR size for

LSR

N RB ( S nk )

u
10
B

1 
H ,
N B ( S nk )

(4)

IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

In this section, various simulation results are demonstrated
to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The
experimental configuration used in this work is described in
the Table II. Three video sequences of UHD frame resolution,
Toy and Calendar, Table Setting, and Tractor, were used. To
compare the results of the proposed algorithm objectively and
subjectively, Has [2] and Huangs [10] methods were also
performed.
TABLE II
EXPERIMENTAL CONFIGURATION
Block Size, B

Maximum Search Range

r128

Test Video Resolution

3840u1920

Input Frame Rate

15 fps

Output Frame Rate

30 fps

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IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 56, No. 2, May 2010

(a)

(b)

(a)
(c)
(d)
(e)
Fig. 6. Performance of the proposed ME algorithm. (a) Original frame of
the Table Setting sequence. (b) Result of the proposed segmentation
method. (c) MVF obtained by using the Ha's method. (d) MVF obtained
with the Huang's method. (e) MVF obtained with the proposed method.

(b)

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Fig. 8. Subjective comparison of the FRUC methods with the Toy and
Calendar sequence. (a) Original frame. (b) Part of the interpolated frame
obtained by using the Ha's method. (c) Part of the interpolated frame by
the Huang's method. (d) Part of the interpolated frame by the proposed
method.

(c)
(d)
Fig. 7. Estimation of the segment MVs in the proposed three-stage ME.
(a) Original frame of the Toy and Calendar sequence. (b) Segments whose
motion is determined at the first stage of the ME. (c) Segments utilized at
the second stage of the ME. (d) Segments utilized at the third stage of the
ME.

For each sequence, the threshold values associated with

object segmentation, T0, T1, T2, and T3, are chosen empirically
as 135, 12, 0.5, and 15, respectively. In the segment selection,
T4 can be adaptively adjusted based on the tradeoff between
computational complexity and motion accuracy. While a low
value for T4 achieves the computational complexity reduction,
temporal consistency can be used for incorrectly matched
segments. In this work, we set T4 to 200 by exhaustive
experiments.
Fig. 6 demonstrates that the segmentation information
obtained by using the proposed block-based segmentation
algorithm can improve the result of the ME effectively. Figs.
6(a) and (b) show an original frame of the Table Setting
sequence and the segmentation result, respectively. As shown
in Fig. 6(b), the proposed segmentation algorithm can divide
the frame into meaningful segments and provide information
about the objects in the scene. Figs. 6(c), (d), and (e) show the
respective MVF results of the conventional FRUC methods
and the proposed method for the square-marked region of the
center plate. The MVF obtained with Ha's method seems very
inconsistent, while the MVFs obtained with Huang's method
and the proposed algorithm represent consistent motions.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Fig. 9. Subjective comparison of the FRUC methods with the Tractor

sequence. (a) Original frame. (b) Part of the interpolated frame obtained
by using the Ha's method. (c) Part of the interpolated frame by the
Huang's method. (d) Part of the interpolated frame by the proposed
method.

However, in the MVF of Huang's method, several prominent

MVs which are different from the neighboring MVs exist near
the border of the plate.
Fig. 7 illustrates how the proposed ME determines the MVs
of the segments in the frame. At the first-stage of the ME, the
MVs of the segments chosen in the segment selection are
determined. As shown in Fig. 7(b), the selected segments are
characterized as large plane or texture regions. Then, the MVs

T.-S. Wang et al.: Enhanced Frame Rate Up-Conversion Method for UHD Video

for smaller neighboring segments are determined. Finally, the

MVs for remaining segments are determined. There are two
main moving objects in the scene: the calendar and the toy
truck. Note that the calendar is selected and processed at the
first stage due to its temporal consistency, while the truck
against the linear motion assumption is not selected since it
turns to the right direction.
The performance of the proposed FRUC method is
subjectively compared with that of the conventional FRUC
methods in Figs. 8 and 9. In Fig. 8, the conventional methods
introduce blocking artifacts on the calendar, while the
proposed method produces the clear and pleasing result. If the
MV of the block including only the white pixels is
inaccurately estimated across the line or the number on the
calendar, the blocking artifact can occur on the interpolated
frame. However, since the white blocks surrounded with lines
are merged into one segment in the proposed method, the MV
of the segment can be obtained exactly.
In Figs. 9(b) and (c), the conventional methods produce the
ghost artifact in front of the windshield since inaccurate MVs
are obtained due to the occlusion covered by the tractor. In the
proposed method, the ground surrounded by the side mirror,
the windshield, and the engine hood is merged into one
segment and one MV is assigned to this large segment.
Therefore, the proposed method produces visually satisfactory
result as shown in Fig. 9(d).
The visual quality of the proposed method is objectively
compared with that of the Ha's and the Huang's algorithms for
the first 50 frames of each test sequence in terms of the peak
signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The test sequences were
temporally skipped by a factor of two to generate the
sequences of 15 fps. The skipped frames were interpolated by
using the conventional and the proposed methods. In addition,
to compare the computational complexity, the relative
complexity defined below is calculated,

1113

V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we proposed the computationally efficient
segment-based ME method for FRUC which can provide
the improved visual quality for UHD video. The proposed
block-based segmentation method was confirmed to
produce meaningful segment information with low
complexity. By estimating the MV for each segment, the
true motion can be obtained accurately. In order to reduce
the computational complexity of the ME, the SR
adaptation and the SSAD are utilized in the proposed
method. Since they were designed based on the motion
analysis of UHD video, significant computation reduction
can be achieved without the accuracy degradation in the
estimated MVF. The experimental results show that the
proposed FRUC method outperforms the conventional
methods subjectively and objectively with reduced
computational loads. The proposed MCFI method can not
only be suitable for the FRUC application for UHD video
but also be successfully employed for various applications
including de-interlacing and view interpolation for multiview video.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

Relative Complexity (RC )

Processing TimeCompared
Processing TimeProposed

(5)

The comparison results of the PSNR and the RC are

summarized in Table III. The proposed method does not only
achieve the improved visual quality for the interpolated frame
by about 2~3dB, but also reduce the computational load
significantly up to 81% of that of a conventional method.

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]
TABLE III
OBJECTIVE COMPARISON OF THE FRUC METHODS
HA'S

HUANG'S

PROPOSED

PSNR

RC

PSNR

RC

PSNR

RC

Toy and
Calendar

30.55

7.5

32.98

3.5

35.02

Table Setting

28.85

5.0

30.44

2.4

32.77

Tractor

28.52

3.4

27.43

1.6

29.13

[11]

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IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 56, No. 2, May 2010

BIOGRAPHIES
Tae-Shick Wang received the B.S. and M.S. degree in
Electronic Engineering from Korea University, in 2006
and 2008, respectively. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in
Department of Electronic Engineering at Korea
University. His research interests include video format
conversion, image and video signal processing.

Kang-Sun Choi (M03) received the Ph.D. degree in

2003, the M.S. degree in 1999, and the B.S. degree in
1997 in Electronic Engineering from Korea University.
From 2003 to 2005, he was a visiting scholar at University
of Southern California. From 2005 to 2008, he worked in
Samsung Electronics, Korea, as a Senior Software
Engineer. In 2008, he joined the Department of Electronic
Engineering at Korea University, where he is currently a
Research Professor. He is a Member of IEEE. His research interests are in the
areas of signal processing, multimedia compression, and communications.

Hyung-Seok Jang received the B.S. degree from Korea

University, in Electronic Engineering, 2008. He is now
pursuing M.S. degree in Department of Electronic
Engineering at Korea University. His current research
interests are in image and video signal processing.

Aldo W. Morales (SM99) received the electronics

engineering degree with distinction from the University of
Tarapaca, Arica, Chile (formerly Northern University) and
the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer
engineering from the State University of New York at
Buffalo in 1978, 1986 and 1990, respectively. From
September 1990 to July 2001 he was with the College of
Engineering, Penn State at DuBois, PA. He is now a Professor of Electrical
Engineering, Penn State University at Harrisburg, PA. His research interests
are in mathematical morphology, digital image processing, computer vision,
signal integrity, high-definition television and wavelets.
Sung-Jea Ko (M88-SM97) received the Ph.D. degree in
1988 and the M.S. degree in 1986, both in Electrical and
Computer Engineering, from State University of New York
at Buffalo, and the B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering at
Korea University in 1980. In 1992, he joined the
Department of Electronic Engineering at Korea University
where he is currently a Professor. From 1988 to 1992, he
was an Assistant Professor of the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He has
published over 130 international journal articles. He also holds over 40 patents on
video signal processing and multimedia communications.
He is currently a Fellow in the IET and a Korean representative of IEEE
Consumer Electronics society. He is the 1999 Recipient of the LG Research
Award given to the Outstanding Information and Communication Researcher. He
received the Hae-Dong best paper award from the IEEK (1997) and the best
paper award from the IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems
(1996), and the research excellence award from Korea University (2004).