Super-resolution techniques for image sequence enlargement

Conventional image interpolation is mostly performed on a single image frame, thus the image quality is greatly constrained when it is applied to enlarge a sequence of images. Super-resolution enlargement algorithm was then proposed to utilize multiple frames as the additional information to estimate the enlarged image sequence. In this paper, a complete system based on super-resolution enlargement algorithm is proposed for image sequence enlargement. This system consists of three major steps, the hierarchical block matching together with partial distortion elimination, the multilevel magnification by iterative resolution enhancement, and the robust point matching to register the center image with the still image. The proposed method achieves better magnification quality than the traditional one. Besides, it is also faster in computation. The registration by robust point-matching algorithm is also successful in combing the still image for obtaining even better magnification results.