Hierarchical Flow Diffusion for Efficient Frame Interpolation

Yang Hai, Guo Wang, Tan Su, Wenjie Jiang, Yinlin Hu; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 22943-22952

Most recent diffusion-based methods still show a large gap compared to non-diffusion methods for video frame interpolation, in both accuracy and efficiency. Most of them formulate the problem as a denoising procedure in latent space directly, which is less effective caused by the large latent space. We propose to model bilateral optical flow explicitly by hierarchical diffusion models, which has much smaller search space in the denoising procedure. Based on the flow diffusion model, we then use a flow-guided image synthesizer to produce the final result. We train the flow diffusion model and the image synthesizer end to end. Our method achieves state of the art in accuracy, and 10+ times faster than other diffusion-based methods. The project page is at: https://hfd-interpolation.github.io.