Deinterlacing algorithm with an advanced non-local means filter

The authors introduce an efficient intra-field deinterlacing algorithm using an advanced non-local means filter. The non-local means (NLM) method has received considerable attention due to its high performance and simplicity. The NLM method adaptively obtains the missing pixel by the weighted average of the gray values of all pixels within the image, and then automatically eliminates unrelated neighborhoods from the weighted average. However, spatial location distance is another important issue for the deinterlacing method. Therefore we introduce an advanced NLM (ANLM) filter while consider neighborhood similarity and patch distance. Moreover, the search region of the conventional NLM is the whole image, while, the ANLM can just utilize the limited search region and achieve good performance and high efficiency. When compared with existing deinterlacing algorithms, the proposed algorithm improves the peak signal-to-noise-ratio while maintaining high efficiency.