Rethinking Video Frame Interpolation from Shutter Mode Induced Degradation

Image restoration from various motion-related degradations, like blurry effects recorded by a global shutter (GS) and jello effects caused by a rolling shutter (RS), has been extensively studied. It has been recently recognized that such degradations encode temporal information, which can be exploited for video frame interpolation (VFI), a more challenging task than pure restoration. However, these VFI researches are mainly grounded on experiments with synthetic data, rather than real data. More fundamentally, under the same imaging condition, it remains unknown which degradation will be more effective toward VFI. In this paper, we present the first real-world dataset for learning and benchmark degraded video frame interpolation, named RD-VFI, and further explore the performance differences of three types of degradations, including GS blur, RS distortion, and an in-between effect caused by the rolling shutter with global reset (RSGR), thanks to our novel quad-axis imaging system. Moreover, we propose a unified Progressive Mutual Boosting Network (PMBNet) model to interpolate middle frames at arbitrary times for all shutter modes. Its disentanglement strategy and dual-stream correction enable us to adaptively deal with different degradations for VFI. Experimental results demonstrate that our PMBNet is superior to the respective state-of-the-art methods on all shutter modes.