MAP fusion method for superresolution of images with locally varying pixel quality

Abstract

Superresolution is a procedure that produces a high-resolution image from a set of low-resolution images. Many of superresolution techniques are designed for optical cameras, which produce pixel values of well-defined uncertainty, while there are still various imaging modalities for which the uncertainty of the images is difficult to control. To construct a superresolution image from low-resolution images with varying uncertainty, one needs to keep track of the uncertainty values in addition to the pixel values. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic approach to superresolution to address the problem of varying uncertainty. As direct computation of the analytic solution for the superresolution problem is difficult, we suggest a novel algorithm for computing the approximate solution. As this algorithm is a noniterative method based on Kaiman filter-like recursion relations, there is a potential for real-time implementation of the algorithm. To show the efficiency of our method, we apply this algorithm to a video sequence acquired by a forward looking sonar system. © 2008 Wlley Periodicals, Inc.