Co-Via: A Video Frame Interpolation Accelerator Exploiting Codec Information Reuse

Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) aims to generate intermediate frames between consecutive frames. Recent DNN-based VFI offers superior quality but suffers from performance issues. However, very few studies have focused on VFI hardware acceleration and existing work overlooks temporal information from compressed video bitstreams. In this paper, we propose a novel compressed VFI workflow and an accelerator, Co-Via. Co-Via exploits codec information reuse to reduce complex DNN computations and alleviate hardware pressure. FPGA-based Co-Via outperforms an RTX 4090 GPU 10.31X, offering a 43.08X energy efficiency boost. Its ASIC version achieves 2.4X higher throughput and 3.6X energy efficiency than the state-of-the-art solution.