TLB-VFI: Temporal-Aware Latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Video Frame Interpolation

Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) aims to predict the intermediate frame $I_n$ (we use n to denote time in videos to avoid notation overload with the timestep $t$ in diffusion models) based on two consecutive neighboring frames $I_0$ and $I_1$. Recent approaches apply diffusion models (both image-based and video-based) in this task and achieve strong performance. However, image-based diffusion models are unable to extract temporal information and are relatively inefficient compared to non-diffusion methods. Video-based diffusion models can extract temporal information, but they are too large in terms of training scale, model size, and inference time. To mitigate the above issues, we propose Temporal-Aware Latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Video Frame Interpolation (TLB-VFI), an efficient video-based diffusion model. By extracting rich temporal information from video inputs through our proposed 3D-wavelet gating and temporal-aware autoencoder, our method achieves \textbf{20}\% improvement in FID on the most challenging datasets over recent SOTA of image-based diffusion models. Meanwhile, due to the existence of rich temporal information, our method achieves strong performance while having \textbf{3}$\times$ fewer parameters. Such a parameter reduction results in \textbf{2.3}$\times$ speed up. By incorporating optical flow guidance, our method requires \textbf{9000}$\times$ less training data and achieves over \textbf{20}$\times$ fewer parameters than video-based diffusion models.