Patent ID: 7375763

Claim:
A method for de-interlacing digital images, comprising: spatial de-interlacing a digital image to obtain a spatial reconstruction; applying, to said digital image, one or more de-interlacing procedures of a temporal type to obtain one or more temporal reconstructions; and selecting from among said spatial reconstruction and said one or more temporal reconstructions, said selecting operation including: obtaining a first cost function result by applying a cost function to said spatial reconstruction, obtaining one or more second cost function results by applying the cost function to said one or more temporal reconstructions, and choosing whichever of said spatial reconstruction and temporal reconstructions minimizes said cost function by comparing the first and second cost function results, wherein said spatial de-interlacing operation provides for operating on a work window of pixels of said digital image adjacent to a pixel to be reconstructed by performing linear interpolation on pairs of pixels belonging to said work window, and said spatial de-interlacing operation further comprises the following operations: extending the work window to a number of pairs of adjacent pixels greater than or equal to three; and adaptively sizing said work window, wherein adaptively sizing said work window includes varying in an adaptive way a number of pairs of pixels that are considered during each instance of the linear interpolation operation, wherein the adaptively varying operation comprises the steps of: using a first number of pairs of pixels for reconstructing a first pixel; and using for reconstructing a second pixel a work window that comprises a second number of pairs of pixels, the second number of pairs of pixels being determined starting from the first number of pairs of pixels according to the following criteria: if the first pixel has been reconstructed using a pair of pixels corresponding to the vertical direction, then the second number of pairs of pixels is equal to the first number of pixels minus one; if the first pixel has been reconstructed using the pair of original pixels corresponding to a steepest slope possible, then the second number of pairs of pixels is equal to the first number of pairs of pixels plus one; in all the other cases, the second number of pairs of pixels is equal to the first number; and in any case, the second number of pairs of pixels must be greater than or equal to three and smaller than or equal to a maximum number of pairs of pixels determined a priori.