AceVFI: A Comprehensive Survey of Advances in Video Frame Interpolation
It provides a detailed overview of VFI techniques for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing work rather than introducing new methods.
This paper presents AceVFI, a comprehensive survey on Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) that covers over 250 papers across various approaches, systematically organizing methodologies, challenges, datasets, and applications to serve as a unified reference for the field.
Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) is a fundamental Low-Level Vision (LLV) task that synthesizes intermediate frames between existing ones while maintaining spatial and temporal coherence. VFI techniques have evolved from classical motion compensation-based approach to deep learning-based approach, including kernel-, flow-, hybrid-, phase-, GAN-, Transformer-, Mamba-, and more recently diffusion model-based approach. We introduce AceVFI, the most comprehensive survey on VFI to date, covering over 250+ papers across these approaches. We systematically organize and describe VFI methodologies, detailing the core principles, design assumptions, and technical characteristics of each approach. We categorize the learning paradigm of VFI methods namely, Center-Time Frame Interpolation (CTFI) and Arbitrary-Time Frame Interpolation (ATFI). We analyze key challenges of VFI such as large motion, occlusion, lighting variation, and non-linear motion. In addition, we review standard datasets, loss functions, evaluation metrics. We examine applications of VFI including event-based, cartoon, medical image VFI and joint VFI with other LLV tasks. We conclude by outlining promising future research directions to support continued progress in the field. This survey aims to serve as a unified reference for both newcomers and experts seeking a deep understanding of modern VFI landscapes.