Perception-Oriented Video Frame Interpolation via Asymmetric Blending
Authors: Guangyang Wu, Xin Tao, Changlin Li, Wenyi Wang, Xiaohong Liu, Qingqing Zheng

Previous methods for Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) have encountered challenges notably the manifestation of blur and ghosting effects. These issues can be traced back to two pivotal factors: unavoidable motion errors and misalignment in supervision. In practice motion estimates often prove to be error-prone resulting in misaligned features. Furthermore the reconstruction loss tends to bring blurry results particularly in misaligned regions. To mitigate these challenges we propose a new paradigm called PerVFI (Perception-oriented Video Frame Interpolation). Our approach incorporates an Asymmetric Synergistic Blending module (ASB) that utilizes features from both sides to synergistically blend intermediate features. One reference frame emphasizes primary content while the other contributes complementary information. To impose a stringent constraint on the blending process we introduce a self-learned sparse quasi-binary mask which effectively mitigates ghosting and blur artifacts in the output. Additionally we employ a normalizing flow-based generator and utilize the negative log-likelihood loss to learn the conditional distribution of the output which further facilitates the generation of clear and fine details. Experimental results validate the superiority of PerVFI demonstrating significant improvements in perceptual quality compared to existing methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/mulns/PerVFI