IM-Net for High Resolution Video Frame Interpolation

Video frame interpolation is a long-studied problem in the video processing field. Recently, deep learning approaches have been applied to this problem, showing impressive results on low-resolution benchmarks. However, these methods do not scale-up favorably to high resolutions. Specifically, when the motion exceeds a typical number of pixels, their interpolation quality is degraded. Moreover, their run time renders them impractical for real-time applications. In this paper we propose IM-Net: an interpolated motion neural network. We use an economic structured architecture and end-to-end training with multi-scale tailored losses. In particular, we formulate interpolated motion estimation as classification rather than regression. IM-Net outperforms previous methods by more than 1.3dB (PSNR) on a high resolution version of the recently introduced Vimeo triplet dataset. Moreover, the network runs in less than 33msec on a single GPU for HD resolution.