Patent ID: 8111324

Claim:
A method, comprising: forming a temporary frame by combining a current video field of a stream of interlaced video fields with a previous video field from the stream of interlaced video fields, wherein each interlaced video field comprises a plurality of pixels, each pixel having a color value; generating a representative pixel for each pixel of the temporary frame, each representative pixel comprising a single bit, wherein a representative pixel for a particular pixel comprises a first indicator value upon the particular pixel having a color value greater than a threshold value and wherein the representative pixel for the particular pixel comprises a second indicator value upon the particular pixel having a color value less than the threshold value, wherein the second indicator value is different than the first indicator value; determining whether at least one pixel within the current video field contains a motion tear artifact by analyzing the at least one pixel using fuzzy logic, wherein the analysis comprises using an observation window comprising a first number of representative pixels of the temporary frame, the first number of representative pixels comprising at least one representative pixel associated with the at least one pixel within the current video field and at least one representative pixel from the previous video field; determining a motion tear score associated with the current video field based on the number of motion tear artifacts within the current video field; recognizing a pattern of temporal periodicity in the motion tear scores for the stream of video fields by comparing the motion tear score associated with current video field to a motion tear score associated with a subsequent video field; and determining the cadence of the stream of video fields based on the pattern of temporal periodicity in the motion tear scores.