Technical Report No. 22, July 1990 - Abstract

Heinrich Müller, Michael Stark:
Interpolation of Synthetic Image Sequences Using Displacement Vector Fields

A new approach, the pixel interpolation algorithm, for interpolating intermediate frames of a computer animation from keyframes is presented. The rendering technique used is full ray tracing. From the keyframes and the spatial input scene, the movement of groups of pixels between the keyframes is estimated and documented in a displacement vector field. From the displacement vector field, regions of the intermediate frames are interpolated. Regions of the intermediate frames not covered by interpolation are postprocessed by ray tracing. The displacement vector field is calculated by an efficient stable plane sweep algorithm in linear space and nearly linear time. An implementation applied on several examples showed typical savings of time against rendering frame by frame between 29 and 43%.