Region-based weighted-norm with adaptive regularization for resolution enhancement

As digital video cameras spread rapidly, critical locations such as airports, train stations, military compounds and airbases and public “hot-spots” are placed in the spotlight of video surveillance. Video surveillance provides visual information, in order to maintain security at the monitored areas. Indeed, super-resolution (SR) technique can be useful for extracting additional information from the captured video sequences. Generally, video surveillance cameras capture moving objects while cameras are moving in some cases, which means that many of the existing SR algorithms, that cannot cope with moving objects, are not applicable in this case. In this paper, we propose a SR algorithm that takes into account inaccurate registration at the moving regions and therefore copes with moving objects. We propose to adaptively weight each region according to its reliability where regions that have local motion and/or occlusion have different registration error level. Also, the regularization parameter is simultaneously estimated for each region. The regions are generated by segmenting the reference frame using watershed segmentation. Our approach is tested on simulated and real data coming from videos with different difficulties taken by a hand-held camera. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared to four state-of-the-art SR algorithms.