Patent ID: 8078010

Claim:
A video image synthesis method comprising the steps of: sampling two contiguous frames from a video image; placing a reference patch comprising one or a plurality of rectangular areas on one of said two frames which is used as a reference frame, then placing on the other of said two frames a second patch which is the same as said reference patch, then moving and/or deforming said second patch in said other frame so that an image within said second patch coincides with an image within said reference patch, and estimating a correspondent relationship between a pixel within said second patch on said other frame and a pixel within said reference patch on said reference frame, based on said second patch after the movement and/or deformation and on said reference patch; acquiring a first interpolated frame whose resolution is higher than each of said frames, by performing interpolation either on the image within said second patch of said other frame or on the image within said second patch of said other frame and image within said reference patch of said reference frame, based on said correspondent relationship; acquiring a second interpolated frame whose resolution is higher than each of said frames, by performing interpolation on the image within said reference patch of said reference frame; acquiring a coordinate-transformed frame by transforming coordinates of the image within said second patch of said other frame to a coordinate space of said reference frame, based on said correspondent relationship; computing a correlation value that represents a correlation between the image within the patch of said coordinate-transformed frame and the image within said reference patch of said reference frame; acquiring a weighting coefficient that makes a weight of said first interpolated frame greater as said correlation becomes greater, when synthesizing said first interpolated frame and second interpolated frame, based on said correlation value; and acquiring a synthesized frame by weighting and synthesizing said first and second interpolated frames, based on said weighting coefficient; wherein a correlation value is calculated for each of the pixels and/or each local region that constitute the other frame, and said correlation values are filtered to compute filtered correlation values, and said weighting coefficient is acquired based on said filtered correlation values.