RIFE: Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation

We propose RIFE, a Real-time Intermediate Flow Estimation algorithm for Video Frame Interpolation (VFI). Most existing methods first estimate the bi-directional optical flows and then linearly combine them to approximate intermediate flows, leading to artifacts on motion boundaries. RIFE uses a neural network named IFNet that can directly estimate the intermediate flows from images. With the more precise flows and our simplified fusion process, RIFE can improve interpolation quality and have much better speed. Based on our proposed leakage distillation loss, RIFE can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments demonstrate that our method is significantly faster than existing VFI methods and can achieve state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/hzwer/arXiv2020-RIFE.