Spatial-domain edge-directed interpolation based de-interlacing to up-scaling technology for 1080i Full HD to Progressive 8K Ultra HD

In this paper, an effective edge-directed low-complex interpolation based method is proposed for 1080i Full HD to Progressive 8K Ultra HD video post-processing. The proposed spatial-domain post-processing technology is composed of two processing stages, where the first stage is the three-scan lines based de-interlacing process for 1080i Full HD to 1080p Full HD conversion, and the second stage is the de-interlacing based upscaling process for 1080p Full HD to 8K UHD conversion. First, the proposed pixel detector classifies the interlaced pixels into five modes, which tend to a smooth pixel, a vertical edge, a horizontal edge, a near horizontal edge, or an uncertain status. Then the corresponding de-interlacing methods are used to interpolate de-interlaced pixels for edge preservation. Second, the same de-interlacing scheme is applied to the upscaling process. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed edge-directed interpolation scheme provides better subjective results than the previous spatial-domain based methods. Moreover, by paying the cost-effective complexities, the proposed method can also achieve the acceptable visually performance for the real-time de-interlacing and upscaling applications.