# BiM-VFI: Bidirectional Motion Field-Guided Frame Interpolation for Video with Non-uniform Motions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11365 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11365/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (2017)
- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [Softmax Splatting for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05534/) (2020)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [Video Frame Interpolation via Adaptive Separable Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01692/) (2017)
- [Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06294/) (2020)
- [UnFlow: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow with a Bidirectional Census Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07837/) (2017)
- [AMT: All-Pairs Multi-Field Transforms for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09790/) (2023)
- [Video Frame Interpolation via Adaptive Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07514/) (2017)
- [Quadratic video interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00627/) (2019)
- [AdaCoF: Adaptive Collaboration of Flows for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10244/) (2019)
- [XVFI: eXtreme Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16206/) (2021)
- [What Matters in Unsupervised Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04902/) (2020)
- [Video Frame Interpolation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13817/) (2021)
- [BMBC:Bilateral Motion Estimation with Bilateral Cost Volume for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12622/) (2020)
- [IFRNet: Intermediate Feature Refine Network for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14620/) (2022)
- [Asymmetric Bilateral Motion Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06815/) (2021)
- [Extracting Motion and Appearance via Inter-Frame Attention for Efficient Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00440/) (2023)
- [Zooming Slow-Mo: Fast and Accurate One-Stage Space-Time Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11616/) (2020)
- [Deep Animation Video Interpolation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02495/) (2021)
- [UPFlow: Upsampling Pyramid for Unsupervised Optical Flow Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00212/) (2020)
- [Shift-tolerant Perceptual Similarity Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13686/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [AceVFI: A Comprehensive Survey of Advances in Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01061/) (2025)
- [Towards Holistic Modeling for Video Frame Interpolation with Auto-regressive Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14959/) (2026)
- [LVTINO: LAtent Video consisTency INverse sOlver for High Definition Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01339/) (2025)
- [SPEED: One-Step Pixel Diffusion for High-quality Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15585/) (2026)
- [Semantic Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05173/) (2025)
- [Taming Real-World Space-Time Video Super-Resolution with One-Step Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20308/) (2026)
- [HeroGS: Hierarchical Guidance for Robust 3D Gaussian Splatting under Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01099/) (2026)
- [FC-VFI: Faithful and Consistent Video Frame Interpolation for High-FPS Slow Motion Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04899/) (2026)
- [3DTV: A Feedforward Interpolation Network for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11211/) (2026)
- [DiffST: Spatiotemporal-Aware Diffusion for Real-World Space-Time Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13182/) (2026)
- [T2exture: Sparsely Perturbed Thermal-to-Texture Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02192/) (2026)
- [SNM-VFI: Symmetric Nonlinear Motion-Guided Generative Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13460/) (2026)
- [Accurate Motion Estimation with B'ezier Control Point for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23408/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing Video Frame interpolation (VFI) models tend to suffer from time-to-location ambiguity when trained with video of non-uniform motions, such as accelerating, decelerating, and changing directions, which often yield blurred interpolated frames. In this paper, we propose (i) a novel motion description map, Bidirectional Motion field (BiM), to effectively describe non-uniform motions; (ii) a BiM-guided Flow Net (BiMFN) with Content-Aware Upsampling Network (CAUN) for precise optical flow estimation; and (iii) Knowledge Distillation for VFI-centric Flow supervision (KDVCF) to supervise the motion estimation of VFI model with VFI-centric teacher flows. The proposed VFI is called a Bidirectional Motion field-guided VFI (BiM-VFI) model. Extensive experiments show that our BiM-VFI model significantly surpasses the recent state-of-the-art VFI methods by 26% and 45% improvements in LPIPS and STLPIPS respectively, yielding interpolated frames with much fewer blurs at arbitrary time instances.