Patent ID: 7346109

Claim:
A method for computing motion vectors in a digital video sequence, comprising: receiving a first image frame at a first resolution, the first image frame including a plurality of image patches, wherein each image patch has a respective first position; receiving a second image frame at the first resolution, the second image frame including one or more image patches corresponding to the image patches in the first image frame, wherein each image patch has a respective second position; for each image patch in the first image frame that has a corresponding image patch in the second image frame; determining a motion vector for the image patch, the determination including generating two or more copies of each of the first and second image frames, each copy having a different, lower, resolution than the first resolution, and selecting a best motion vector among a plurality of vectors at each resolution; and using the determined motion vector to establish an intermediate position of the image patch in an interpolated frame that is intermediary to the first and second frames.