Video Frame Interpolation via Generalized Deformable Convolution
Zhihao Shi, Xiaohong Liu, Kangdi Shi, Linhui Dai, Jun Chen
Abstract
Video frame interpolation aims at synthesizing intermediate frames from nearby source frames while maintaining spatial and temporal consistencies. The existing deep-learning-based video frame interpolation methods can be roughly divided into two categories: flow-based methods and kernel-based methods. The performance of flow-based methods is often jeopardized by the inaccuracy of flow map estimation due to oversimplified motion models, while that of kernel-based methods tends to be constrained by the rigidity of kernel shape. To address these performance-limiting issues, a novel mechanism named generalized deformable convolution is proposed, which can effectively learn motion information in a data-driven manner and freely select sampling points in space-time. We further develop a new video frame interpolation method based on this mechanism. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the new method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art, especially when dealing with complex motions. Code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/zhshi0816/GDConvNet</uri> .