Video Frame Interpolation via Multi-scale Expandable Deformable Convolution

Video frame interpolation is a challenging task in the video processing field. Benefiting from the development of deep learning, many video frame interpolation methods have been proposed, which focus on sampling pixels with useful information to synthesize each output pixel using their own sampling operation. However, these works have data redundancy limitations and fail to sample the correct pixel of complex motions. To solve these problems, we propose a new warping framework to sample called multi-scale expandable deformable convolution(MSEConv) which employs a deep fully convolutional neural network to estimate multiple smallscale kernel weights with different expansion degrees and adaptive weight allocation for each pixel synthesis. MSEConv covers most prevailing research methods as special cases of it, thus MSEConv is also possible to be transferred to existing works for performance improvement. To further improve the robustness of the whole network to occlusion, we also introduce a data preprocessing method for mask occlusion in video frame interpolation. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method shows a robust performance comparable to or even superior to the state-of-the-art method. Our source code and visual comparable results are available at https://github.com/Pumpkin123709/MSEConv.