An inpainting-based deinterlacing method

Video is usually acquired in interlaced format, where each image frame is composed of two image fields, each field/nholding same parity lines. However, many display devices require progressive video as input; also, many video processing tasks perform better on progressive material than on interlaced video. In the literature, there exist a great number of algorithms for interlaced to progressive video conversion, with a great tradeoff between the speed and quality of the results. The best algorithms in terms of image quality require motion compensation; hence, they are computationally very intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel deinterlacing algorithm based on ideas from the image inpainting arena. We view the lines to interpolate as gaps that we need to inpaint. Numerically, this is implemented using a dynamic programming procedure, which ensures a complexity of O(S), where S is the number of pixels in the image. The results obtained with our algorithm compare favorably, in terms of image quality, with state-of-the-art methods, but at a lower computational cost, since we do not need to perform motion field estimation