Super Resolution Image Reconstruction using the Maximum A-Posteriori Method

Images with high resolution are desired and often required in many visual applications. When resolution can not be improved by replacing sensors, either because of cost or hardware physical limits, super resolution image reconstruction method is what can be resorted to. Super resolution image reconstruction method refers to image processing algorithms that produce high quality and high resolution images from a set of low quality and low resolution images. The method is proved to be useful in many practical cases where multiple frames of the same scene can be obtained, including satellite imaging, video surveillance, video enhancement and restoration, digital mosaicking, and medical imaging. The method can be either the frequency domain approach or the spatial domain approach. Much of the earlier works concentrated on the frequency domain formulation, but as more general degradation models were considered, later researches had been almost exclusively on spatial domain formulations. The method in spatial domains has three stages: i) motion estimate or image registration, ii) interpolation onto high resolution grid and iii) deblurring process. The super resolution grid construction in the second stage was discussed in this paper. We applied the Maximum A­Posteriori(MAP) reconstruction method that is one of the major methods in the super resolution grid construction. Based on this method, we reconstructed high resolution images from a set of low resolution images and compared the results with those from other known interpolation methods.