To implement multi-frame super-resolution restoration of low-resolution images or video sequences with nonglobal motion, an interpolation-filtering method which is based on the recently proposed nonlocal-mean (NLM) filter is presented. Firstly, each frame of a sequence is interpolated to desired resolution by cubic-spline or other algorithms. Then the NLM filter is applied on these interpolated frames, while this filter is extended from single image at spatial domain to multiple images at spatial and temporal domain simultaneously. Finally, these high-resolution images are used to reconstruct the anticipant images or sequence. Although the NLM does not strongly rely on the accurate motion estimation and is not sensitive to nonglobal motion, to reduce the complexity and improve results, a two-step method for coarse motion estimation is adopted to obtain the motion vectors between frames. The obtained vectors act as initial candidate location for the weight computing and pixel filtering of NLM. The performances are tested on a simulated data and on a real video sequence together with the existing methods. Results on these tests show that the proposed technique is successful in providing super-resolution on general real sequences.

Date Published: 30 October 2009
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 7494, MIPPR 2009: Multispectral Image Acquisition and Processing, 74941G (30 October 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.832881

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7494:
MIPPR 2009: Multispectral Image Acquisition and Processing
Faxiong Zhang; Faxiong Zhang, Editor(s)