2008 Research Summary

Architecture for Faster Video Temporal Up-Conversion

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Alan J. Smith and Jeremy Rahe

The refresh rates for television screens and handheld devices exceed the bandwidth available to supply them video, whether that bandwidth is limited by available spectrum or by storage capacity.

In order to fully utilize the refresh rate, we are working on a system for performing temporal up-conversion, in which a low-frame-rate video stream is converted to a higher frame rate stream, resulting in a smoother viewing experience.

Temporal up-conversion requires producing pictures that would have been taken if the video stream had been captured at a higher frame rate. To do this, the frames are analyzed for movement and a smoothed field of motion vectors is calculated to represent the movement between frames. From these motion vectors, we can then interpolate to produce intermediate frames. We must do this in real time at 120 Hz refresh rates.

NXP just released a device to perform such up-conversion on a board that uses three of its TriMedia multimedia processors. Our work is focused on developing the architecture for the next generation TriMedia processor, with the target of performing full 1080p temporal up-conversion on a single processor.