Emulating displays with continuously varying frame rates

The visual quality of a motion picture is significantly influenced by the choice of the presentation frame rate. Increasing the frame rate improves the clarity of the image and helps to alleviate many artifacts, such as blur, strobing, flicker, or judder. These benefits, however, come at the price of losing well-established film aesthetics, often referred to as the "cinematic look". Current technology leaves artists with a sparse set of choices, e.g., 24 Hz or 48 Hz, limiting the freedom in adjusting the frame rate to artistic needs, content, and display technology. In this paper, we solve this problem by proposing a novel filtering technique which enables emulating the whole spectrum of presentation frame rates on a single-frame-rate display. The key component of our technique is a set of simple yet powerful filters calibrated and evaluated in psychophysical experiments. By varying their parameters we can achieve an impression of continuously varying presentation frame rate in both the spatial and temporal dimensions. This allows artists to achieve the best balance between the aesthetics and the objective quality of the motion picture. Furthermore, we show how our technique, informed by cinematic guidelines, can adapt to the content and achieve this balance automatically.