Improved super-resolution reconstruction from video

Super-resolution (SR) reconstruction usually consists of four steps: registration, interpolation, restoration, and postprocessing. The registration precision (RP) and the initial SR image estimation (ISIE) greatly influence the quality of reconstructed images. A scheme to enhance RP and ISIE is proposed in this paper. Before the registration, each video frame is iteratively upsampled, the registration from current SR reconstructed frame and its adjacent upsampled frames are then estimated, and adjacent frames are warped with registrations to form the high-definition (HD) constraint set, while input frames are used to construct the low-definition (LD) constraint set. The SR reconstructed image corresponds to the minimum difference with the HD constraint set, and its warped and downsampled form corresponds to the minimum difference with the LD constraint set. ISIE can thus be improved from the HD constraint set. In this scheme, the outlier registration with the HD pixel precision is obtained by comparing warped HD frames with the reconstructed SR image, and the adverse influence can be eliminated in calculating LD difference to accelerate the convergence rate of the SR reconstruction and improve the quality of reconstructed images. The performance improvement of the proposed scheme over some existing work is shown in experimental results.