Structural similarity based single image super-resolution with nonlocal regularization

Recently, sparse coding based image super-resolution has attracted increasing interests. This paper proposes an improved image super-resolution method, by incorporating structural similarity (SSIM) index and nonlocal regularization into the framework of image super-resolution via sparse coding. Firstly, an algorithm of combining SSIM based sparse coding and K-SVD is proposed to train the high resolution (HR) and low resolution (LR) dictionary pairs. And then, the sparse representations of observed LR image are sought to reconstruct the HR image with the trained LR and HR dictionary pairs by exploiting nonlocal self-similarities. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, both in its visual effects and in quantitative terms.