Toward high-quality image communications: inverse problems in image processing

Abstract

Recently, image communications are becoming increasingly popular, and there is a growing need for consumers to be provided with high-quality services. Although the image communication services already exist over third-generation wireless networks, there are still obstacles that prevent high-quality image communications because of limited bandwidth. Thus, more research is required to overcome the limited bandwidth of current communications systems and achieve high-quality image reconstruction in real applications. From the point of view of image processing, core technologies for high-quality image reconstruction are face hallucination and compression artifact reduction. The main interests of consumers are facial regions and several compression artifacts inevitably occur by compression; these two technologies are closely related to inverse problems in image processing. We review recent studies on face hallucination and compression artifact reduction, and provide an outline of current research. Furthermore, we discuss practical considerations and possible solutions to implement these two technologies in real mobile applications. © 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).