Patent ID: 8274602

Claim:
An image processing apparatus comprising: a motion estimation module configured to calculate motion vectors for respective blocks in each frame in moving image data by estimating motion between frames in the moving image data; a redundant frame determination module configured to determine whether a target frame is a redundant frame based on the motion vectors corresponding to the target frame and the motion vectors corresponding to a non-redundant frame preceding the target frame; an interpolation frame generation module configured to discard the target frame if the target frame is a redundant frame, and to generate an interpolation frame between the target frame and the preceding non-redundant frame by motion compensation using the motion vectors corresponding to the target frame and to output the interpolation frame and the target frame, if the target frame is a non-redundant frame; and a data storing module configured to store the target frame as the preceding non-redundant frame and to store the motion vectors corresponding to the target frame as motion vectors corresponding to the preceding non-redundant frame, if the target frame is the non-redundant frame, wherein the redundant frame determination module is configured to determine that the target frame is a redundant frame, if a number of blocks in the target frame for which the motion vector is a zero vector is equal to or more than a first threshold and a difference between the motion vectors of the target frame and the motion vectors of the stored preceding non-redundant frame is equal to or more than a second threshold.