Frame Interpolation Transformer and Uncertainty Guidance

Markus Plack, Karlis Martins Briedis, Abdelaziz Djelouah, Matthias B. Hullin, Markus Gross, Christopher Schroers; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 9811-9821

Video frame interpolation has seen important progress in recent years, thanks to developments in several directions. Some works leverage better optical flow methods with improved splatting strategies or additional cues from depth, while others have investigated alternative approaches through direct predictions or transformers. Still, the problem remains unsolved in more challenging conditions such as complex lighting or large motion. In this work, we are bridging the gap towards video production with a novel transformer-based interpolation network architecture capable of estimating the expected error together with the interpolated frame. This offers several advantages that are of key importance for frame interpolation usage: First, we obtained improved visual quality over several datasets. The improvement in terms of quality is also clearly demonstrated through a user study. Second, our method estimates error maps for the interpolated frame, which are essential for real-life applications on longer video sequences where problematic frames need to be flagged. Finally, for rendered content a partial rendering pass of the intermediate frame, guided by the predicted error, can be utilized during the interpolation to generate a new frame of superior quality. Through this error estimation, our method can produce even higher-quality intermediate frames using only a fraction of the time compared to a full rendering.