Super resolution using edge prior and single image detail synthesis

• Published in: 2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition pp. 2400 - 2407
• Main Authors: Yu-Wing Tai, Shuaicheng Liu, Brown, M S, Lin, S
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2010
• Subjects: Asia; Frequency estimation; Image databases; Image reconstruction; Image resolution; Interpolation; Nearest neighbor searches; Statistical distributions; Strontium; Training data
• ISBN: 1424469848; 9781424469840
• ISSN: 1063-6919; 1063-6919
• DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2010.5539933

Edge-directed image super resolution (SR) focuses on ways to remove edge artifacts in upsampled images. Under large magnification, however, textured regions become blurred and appear homogenous, resulting in a super-resolution image that looks unnatural. Alternatively, learning-based SR approaches use a large database of exemplar images for "hallucinating" detail. The quality of the upsampled image, especially about edges, is dependent on the suitability of the training images. This paper aims to combine the benefits of edge-directed SR with those of learning-based SR. In particular, we propose an approach to extend edge-directed super-resolution to include detail from an image/texture example provided by the user (e.g., from the Internet). A significant benefit of our approach is that only a single exemplar image is required to supply the missing detail - strong edges are obtained in the SR image even if they are not present in the example image due to the combination of the edge-directed approach. In addition, we can achieve quality results at very large magnification, which is often problematic for both edge-directed and learning-based approaches.