Super-resolution reconstruction of astronomical images using time-scale adaptive normalized convolution

In this work, we describe a new multiframe Super-Resolution (SR) framework based on time-scale adaptive Normalized Convolution (NC), and apply it to astronomical images. The method mainly uses the conceptual basis of NC where each neighborhood of a signal is expressed in terms of the corresponding subspace expanded by the chosen polynomial basis function. Instead of the conventional NC, the introduced spatially adaptive filtering kernel is utilized as the applicability function of shape-adaptive NC, which fits the local image structure information including shape and orientation. This makes it possible to obtain image patches with the same modality, which are collected for polynomial expansion to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio and suppress aliasing artifacts across lines and edges. The robust signal certainty takes the confidence value at each point into account before a local polynomial expansion to minimize the influence of outliers. Finally, the temporal scale applicability is considered to omit accurate motion estimation since it is easy to result in annoying registration errors in real astronomical applications. Excellent SR reconstruction capability of the time-scale adaptive NC is demonstrated through fundamental experiments on both synthetic images and real astronomical images when compared with other SR reconstruction methods.