Sparse Global Matching for Video Frame Interpolation with Large Motion

Abstract

Large motion poses a critical challenge in Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) task. Existing methods are often constrained by limited receptive fields resulting in sub-optimal performance when handling scenarios with large motion. In this paper we introduce a new pipeline for VFI which can effectively integrate global-level information to alleviate issues associated with large motion. Specifically we first estimate a pair of initial intermediate flows using a high-resolution feature map for extracting local details. Then we incorporate a sparse global matching branch to compensate for flow estimation which consists of identifying flaws in initial flows and generating sparse flow compensation with a global receptive field. Finally we adaptively merge the initial flow estimation with global flow compensation yielding a more accurate intermediate flow. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method in handling large motion we carefully curate a more challenging subset from commonly used benchmarks. Our method demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on these VFI subsets with large motion.