# Slow - Motion Video Synthesis for Basketball Using Frame Interpolation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11644 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11644/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 3 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [SportsSloMo: A New Benchmark and Baselines for Human-centric Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16876/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Basketball broadcast footage is traditionally captured at 30-60 fps, limiting viewers' ability to appreciate rapid plays such as dunks and crossovers. We present a real-time slow-motion synthesis system that produces high-quality basketball-specific interpolated frames by fine-tuning the recent Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation (RIFE) network on the SportsSloMo dataset. Our pipeline isolates the basketball subset of SportsSloMo, extracts training triplets, and fine-tunes RIFE with human-aware random cropping. We compare the resulting model against Super SloMo and the baseline RIFE model using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM) on held-out clips. The fine-tuned RIFE attains a mean PSNR of 34.3 dB and SSIM of 0.949, outperforming Super SloMo by 2.1 dB and the baseline RIFE by 1.3 dB. A lightweight Gradio interface demonstrates end-to-end 4x slow-motion generation on a single RTX 4070 Ti Super at approximately 30 fps. These results indicate that task-specific adaptation is crucial for sports slow-motion, and that RIFE provides an attractive accuracy-speed trade-off for consumer applications.