RVFIT: Real-time Video Frame Interpolation Transformer

Video frame interpolation (VFI), which aims to synthesize predictive frames from bidirectional historical references, has made remarkable progress with the development of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) over the past years. Existing CNNs generally face challenges in handing large motions due to the locality of convolution operations, resulting in a slow inference structure. We introduce a Real-time video frame interpolation transformer (RVFIT), a novel framework to overcome this limitation. Unlike traditional methods based on CNNs, this paper does not process video frames separately with different network modules in the spatial domain but batches adjacent frames through a single UNet-style structure end-to-end Transformer network architecture. Moreover, this paper creatively sets up two-stage interpolation sampling before and after the end-to-end network to maximize the performance of the traditional CV algorithm. The experimental results show that compared with SOTA TMNet, RVFIT has only 50% of the network size (6.2M vs 12.3M, parameters) while ensuring comparable performance, and the speed is increased by 80% (26.1 fps vs 14.3 fps, frame size is 720*576).