  Human-centric video frame interpolation has great potential for improving
people's entertainment experiences and finding commercial applications in the
sports analysis industry, e.g., synthesizing slow-motion videos. Although there
are multiple benchmark datasets available in the community, none of them is
dedicated for human-centric scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce
SportsSloMo, a benchmark consisting of more than 130K video clips and 1M video
frames of high-resolution ($\geq$720p) slow-motion sports videos crawled from
YouTube. We re-train several state-of-the-art methods on our benchmark, and the
results show a decrease in their accuracy compared to other datasets. It
highlights the difficulty of our benchmark and suggests that it poses
significant challenges even for the best-performing methods, as human bodies
are highly deformable and occlusions are frequent in sports videos. To improve
the accuracy, we introduce two loss terms considering the human-aware priors,
where we add auxiliary supervision to panoptic segmentation and human keypoints
detection, respectively. The loss terms are model agnostic and can be easily
plugged into any video frame interpolation approaches. Experimental results
validate the effectiveness of our proposed loss terms, leading to consistent
performance improvement over 5 existing models, which establish strong baseline
models on our benchmark. The dataset and code can be found at:
https://neu-vi.github.io/SportsSlomo/.
