Adaptive shock filter for image super-resolution and enhancement

• Adaptive shock filter is used to reduce distortion artifacts of upsampled images.
• Both edge-stopping function term and forward diffusion process term are proposed.
• The weight of shock filter relies on the gradients of the interpolated image.

In view of that image interpolation methods generally tend to produce considerable edge halos, blurring and aliasing artifacts for image super-resolution. A novel image enhancement algorithm based on adaptive shock filter for image super-resolution is proposed to solve this problem. The weight of shock filter can be adjusted adaptively according to the gradients of the interpolated high-resolution image. Thus the diffusion of image edges is suppressed and the artifacts are removed by the forward diffusion. Compared with the traditional shock filter, the proposed algorithm eliminates edge halos and jagged artifacts, whereas the fine image structures are reserved effectively. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better results than the state-of-the-art methods both subjectively and objectively in most cases.