Edge adaptive image resolution enhancement in video sensor network

Video sensor network usually uses fairly low-resolution images due to the limited transmission bandwidth in transmitting images. It is potential to enhance the captured low-resolution images using image resolution enhancement technique that is able to produce a high-resolution image from its low-resolution counterpart. The key challenge of image resolution enhancement is to preserve the edge structure in images. In this paper, a new image resolution enhancement approach is proposed to estimate the intensity of the unknown pixel using a bilateral weighted average of that of its neighboring pixels. More specifically, the neighboring pixels with nearer distance have larger contributions. Furthermore, the neighboring pixels belonging to direction with smaller variation have larger contributions. Experimental results are provided to show that the proposed approach outperforms several conventional edge-directed image interpolation algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed approach yields low computational complexity; it is potential for real-time implementation.

Research highlights
► We propose a new image resolution enhancement approach for video sensor network.
► The proposed approach uses a bilateral weighting scheme to adaptively adjust the interpolation according to local intensity property of images.
► The proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art image resolution enhancement algorithms.