Time-recursive deinterlacing for IDTV and pyramid coding

Most improved-definition television (IDTV) receivers use progressive scanning to reduce artifacts associated with interlacing (e.g. interline flicker, line crawl). Some novel techniques of motion compensated interpolation of the missing lines of interlaced monochrome and color sequences, reducing the artifacts associated with interlacing, and effectively increasing the vertical resolution of the image sequences are proposed. Time-recursive motion compensation prediction is introduced, in which all previously displayed history (not just the previous field) is used to predict the missing pixel values. The next future field is also used for the same purpose, by a lookahead scheme. Motion estimation is done using a quadtree-based segmented block-matching technique with half-pixel accuracy. To avoid artifacts and obtain full resolution in still regions, such as background, motion adaptation is also used. How to apply this algorithm to pyramid coding to achieve a better compression rate and compatibility with other lesser resolution standards is discussed. >