A high quality single-image super-resolution algorithm based on linear Bayesian MAP estimation with sparsity prior

This paper proposes a novel single-image super-resolution algorithm based on linear Bayesian maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation and sparse representation. Starting from constructing several probability distribution priors in representation vector, we develop a linear Bayesian MAP estimator to acquire the most probable high-resolution (HR) image behind the low-resolution (LR) observation. Our new algorithm involves three main steps: (1) obtaining an initial estimate of the HR image via bi-cubic interpolation algorithm, (2) performing sparse coding on the initial estimate to get the representation vector and its support, (3) using the MAP estimator to restore the desired representation vector and then reconstructing the HR output. Simulated results show that the proposed method can achieve a more competitive performance both in subjective visual quality and in peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) measures, compared with other state-of-the-art super-resolution methods.