Converting the interlaced 3:2 pulldown film to the NTSC video without motion artifacts

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new format conversion methodology in which the interlaced 3:2 pulldown film is converted to the NTSC video. For display purposes, the 24 frames/s film is converted to 60 fields/s video by alternatively repeating each frame for 3 fields and 2 fields. This conversion results in severe motion judder when the film is displayed on the progressive TV. Although motion estimation and compensation (ME and MC) are employed to eliminate the motion judder, other artifacts may be resulted depending on the accuracy of ME. Such motion artifacts are including halo effects, block artifacts and the severe distortion in periodic patterns when the block-based ME is used to interpolate the intermediate fields. To resolve those problems, we propose a robust full-search block motion algorithm using pseudo M-estimator, which is performed on field images to reduce the physical memory size (reducing motion search range) when implemented with hardware.