Video Object Segmentation-aware Video Frame Interpolation

Video frame interpolation (VFI) is a very active research topic due to its broad applicability to many applications, including video enhancement, video encoding, and slow-motion effects. VFI methods have been advanced by improving the overall image quality for challenging sequences containing occlusions, large motion, and dynamic texture. This mainstream research direction neglects that foreground and background regions have different importance in perceptual image quality. Moreover, accurate synthesis of moving objects can be of utmost importance in computer vision applications. In this paper, we propose a video object segmentation (VOS)-aware training framework called VOS-VFI that allows VFI models to interpolate frames with more precise object boundaries. Specifically, we exploit VOS as an auxiliary task to help train VFI models by providing additional loss functions, including segmentation loss and bi-directional consistency loss. From extensive experiments, we demonstrate that VOS-VFI can boost the performance of existing VFI models by rendering clear object boundaries. Moreover, VOS-VFI displays its effectiveness on multiple benchmarks for different applications, including video object segmentation, object pose estimation, and visual tracking.