Multi-frame image super resolution based on sparse coding

An image super-resolution method from multiple observation of low-resolution images is proposed. The method is based on sub-pixel accuracy block matching for estimating relative displacements of observed images, and sparse signal representation for estimating the corresponding high-resolution image, where correspondence between high- and low-resolution images are modeled by a certain degradation process. Relative displacements of small patches of observed low-resolution images are accurately estimated by a computationally efficient block matching method. The matching scores of the block matching are used to select a subset of low-resolution patches for reconstructing a high-resolution patch, that is, an adaptive selection of informative low-resolution images is realized. The proposed method is shown to perform comparable or superior to conventional super-resolution methods through experiments using various images.