Manifold-preserving single-image super-resolution based on collaborative representation support

Investigating single image super-resolution algorithm with deep learning using convolutional neural network for chest digital tomosynthesis

In this paper, we propose a novel single image super-resolution algorithm that integrates a model-based approach with self-learning deep networks. The proposed method can be adapted to low-resolution (LR) images obtained with real acquisition devices where the point spread function is Gaussian-like. By modelling natural image lines as piece-wise smooth functions and approximating the blurring kernel with B-splines, an intermediate high-resolution (HR) image can be first obtained based on Finite Rate of Innovation theory. A self-supervised deep recursive residual network is then applied to further enhance the reconstruction quality. From the simulation results, our algorithm outperforms other self-learning algorithms and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Special Section on Enabling Technologies for Network-Based Applications

This paper proposes a single image super resolution algorithm with the aim of satisfying three desirable characteristics, namely, high quality of the produced images, adaptability to image contents...

Single image super-resolution (SR) algorithms based on joint dictionaries and sparse representations of image patches have received significant attention in the literature and deliver the state-of-the-art results. Recently, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) have emerged as favored prior for natural image patches in various image restoration problems. In this paper, we approach the single image SR problem by using a joint GMM learnt from concatenated vectors of high and low resolution patches sampled from a large database of pairs of high resolution and the corresponding low resolution images. Covariance matrices of the learnt Gaussian models capture the inherent correlations between high and low resolution patches, which are utilized for inferring high resolution patches from given low resolution patches. The proposed joint GMM method can be interpreted as the GMM analogue of joint dictionary-based algorithms for single image SR. We study the performance of the proposed joint GMM method by comparing with various competing algorithms for single image SR. Our experiments on various natural images demonstrate the competitive performance obtained by the proposed method at low computational cost.

Gradient boosting for single image super-resolution

The single image super resolution recovers missing high resolution details so as to reconstruct a high resolution image from a single low resolution image. This paper proposes a novel directionally adaptive, learning-based, single image super resolution method using multiple direction wavelet transform, called directionlets. Here, critically sampled directionlets are used to capture directional features effectively and to extract edge information along different directions from a set of available high resolution images. This information is used as the training set for super resolving a low resolution input image. The directionlet coefficients at finer scales of its high resolution image are learned locally from this training set and the inverse directionlet transform recovers the super resolved high resolution image. The simulation results showed that the proposed directionlet approach outperforms standard interpolation techniques like cubic spline interpolation as well as standard wavelet-based learning, both visually and in terms of the mean squared error (MSE) values. The SNR scores for cubic spline interpolation, wavelet and directionlet method are 13.6998 dB, 23.8324 dB and 30.8654 dB respectively for Barbara.

An Image sensor is converts an image into a digital signal. Both CCD (charged coupled device) and CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) image sensor technologies are essential for image capturing. CMOS image sensor is still in their early years, still it's set to develop but CCD has number of advantages over CMOS. CCD will give you a assurance for more compact, high image quality and potentially more efficient camera. Both CCD and CMOS Technologies have explained in this paper and also how images are captured as well as types for both types of image sensors have been descried. Some issues such as performance characteristics for better image quality for photography have been covered.

The success of modern single image super-resolution (SISR) algorithms is inspired by the development of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, these CNN-based methods require considerable computation and complexity, making it impossible for these methods to perform real-time calculations in edge devices. Thus, lightweight model design has become a development trend in the super-resolution field, including pruning, quantization, and other methods. The 1-bit quantization is an extreme lightweight method which can reduce the calculation amount of the model in an extreme manner and is friendly to hardware such as edge devices. Most existing binary quantization approaches lead to a large information loss during forward propagation, especially in detailed color information (e.g., edge, texture, and contrast). The loss of color information makes modern binary methods unsuitable for SISR tasks. We think the loss occurs because these methods typically utilize a uniform threshold to quantize the weights and activations. Thus, in this article, we thoroughly analyze the difference between normal classification tasks and SISR tasks, and present a binarization scheme based on local means. The proposed method can maintain more detailed information in feature maps using dynamic thresholds during quantization. Specifically, each value in the full precision activations has a corresponding threshold during the quantization process, and those thresholds are determined by the full precision values of the surroundings. In addition, a gradient approximator is introduced to adaptively optimize the gradient for updating binary weights. We then verify the effectiveness of our method for training binary networks on several SISR benchmarks including VDSR and SRResNet. Experimental results show that the proposed method can outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms to obtain binary networks for image super-resolution with better peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values and visual quality.

Depth images play an important role and are popularly used in many computer vision tasks recently. However, the limited resolution of the depth image has been hindering its further applications. To address this problem, we propose a novel dual sparsity model based single depth image super resolution algorithm, with a single low-resolution depth image as input. We formulate this problem by combining the recently developed analysis model and synthesis model exploiting the sparsity of analyzed vectors and the sparse coefficients respectively. The analysis operator and dictionaries are trained over extensive samples separately. We show that our model clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the widely used Middlebury 2007 datasets both quantitatively and visually.

In recent years, keypoints-based features, such as speeded up robust features (SURF), capture the attention of researchers in the area of image copy-move forgery detection. They are fast to compute and are quite robust to most inter-processing and post-processing operations. However, they will fail to detect the forgery if not enough keypoints are detected, and that is the case when the forgery size is small. A small size forgery is possible if the object is far away from the camera, or if the image is scaled down as a post-processing step. In this paper, our focus is on detecting forgeries of small size using an improved SURF based copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) method. Our method improves keypoints detection by preprocessing the image using a single image super resolution (SISR) algorithm. The proposed approach has been evaluated and compared against original SURF through a comprehensive set of experiments using a dataset of small size forgeries. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms SURF especially when the forgery size is small.

Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for many applications in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">supervised</i> manner has resulted in state-of-the-art results. Such supervised models achieve remarkable accuracy; albeit their poor generalization ability for real-world Low-Resolution (LR) images. Supervised training in many SR works involves synthetically generated LR images from its corresponding High-Resolution (HR) images. As the distribution of such LR observation is relatively different from that of real LR image, the supervised training in SISR task results degradation when applied on real-world data. SISR has been scaled to real-world data recently by posing the unsupervised problem into a supervised one through learning the distribution of noisy LR observation first, following which supervised training is performed to obtain the SR image. It therefore involves two steps where the accuracy of SR image relies on how closely the LR’s distribution is learnt in the first step. In this work, we overcome such limitation by introducing unsupervised denoising network to transform real noisy LR image to clean image and then pre-trained SR network is utilised to increase the spatial resolution of cleaned LR image to generate SR image. Thus, instead of evaluating the denoised image in LR space to train the denoising network, we inspect the denoised image in SR space which allows to overcome the SR network’s generalization problem. The proposed Unsupervised Denoising framework for Super-Resolution ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">UDSR</i> ) is validated on real-world datasets (NTIRE-2020 Real-World SR Challenge validation and testing dataset (Track-1)) by comparing it with many recent unsupervised SISR methods. The performance of denoising and SR networks is superior in terms of various perceptual indices such as Perceptual Index (PI) and Ma Score in addition to numerous non-references metrics.

Based on the assumption about the sparse representation of natural images and the theory of compressed sensing, very promising results about single-image super-resolution were obtained by an excellent algorithm introduced by Yang et al. [45]. However, their success could not be well explained theoretically. The lack of theoretical insight has hindered the further improvement of the algorithm. In this paper, Yang’s algorithm is revisited in the view of learning theory. According to this point, Yang’s algorithm can be considered as a linear regression method in a special feature space which is named as sparse coding space by us. In fact, it has been shown that Yang’s algorithm is a result of optimal linear estimation in sparse coding space. More importantly, our theoretical analysis suggests that Yang’s algorithm can be improved by using more flexible regression methods than the linear regression method. Following the idea, a novel single-image super-resolution algorithm which is designed based on the framework of L2-Boosting is proposed in the paper. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing with other methods, which verify our theoretical analysis about Yang’s algorithm.

Deep learning methods have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in single image super-resolution (SISR). Yet, how to achieve good balance between efficiency and accuracy in SISR is still an open issue. While most existing methods learn residual features only in low resolution (LR) space in order for higher efficiency, recent studies show that jointly learning residual features in LR and high resolution (HR) space is more preferred for accurate SISR. In this paper, we propose an efficient SISR method via learning hybrid residual features, based on which the residual HR image can be reconstructed. To fulfill hybrid residual feature learning, we propose a compact back-projection network that can simultaneously generate features in both LR and HR space by cascading up-and down-sampling layers with small-sized filters. Extensive experiments on four benchmark databases demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve high efficiency (i.e., small number of parameters and operations) while preserving state-of-the-art SR accuracy.

Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) aims to reconstruct a high-resolution image from its corresponding low-resolution input. A common technique to enhance the reconstruction quality is Non-Local Attention (NLA), which leverages self-similar texture patterns in images. However, we have made a novel finding that challenges the prevailing wisdom. Our research reveals that NLA can be detrimental to SISR and even produce severely distorted textures. For example, when dealing with severely degrade textures, NLA may generate unrealistic results due to the inconsistency of non-local texture patterns. This problem is overlooked by existing works, which only measure the average reconstruction quality of the whole image, without considering the potential risks of using NLA. To address this issue, we propose a new perspective for evaluating the reconstruction quality of NLA, by focusing on the sub-pixel level that matches the pixel-wise fusion manner of NLA. From this perspective, we provide the approximate reconstruction performance upper bound of NLA, which guides us to design a concise yet effective Texture-Fidelity Strategy (TFS) to mitigate the degradation caused by NLA. Moreover, the proposed TFS can be conveniently integrated into existing NLA-based SISR models as a general building block. Based on the TFS, we develop a Deep Texture-Fidelity Network (DTFN), which achieves state-of-the-art performance for SISR. Our code and a pre-trained DTFN are available on GitHub† for verification.