Sparse super-resolution reconstructions of video from mobile devices in digital TV broadcast applications

Abstract

We consider the mobile service scenario where video programming is broadcast to low-resolution wireless terminals. In such a scenario, broadcasters utilize simultaneous data services and bi-directional communications capabilities of the terminals in order to offer substantially enriched viewing experiences to users by allowing user participation and user tuned content. While users immediately benefit from this service when using their phones in mobile environments, the service is less appealing in stationary environments where a regular television provides competing programming at much higher display resolutions. We propose a fast super-resolution technique that allows the mobile terminals to show a much enhanced version of the broadcast video on nearby high-resolution devices, extending the appeal and usefulness of the broadcast service. The proposed single frame super-resolution algorithm uses recent sparse recovery results to provide high quality and high-resolution video reconstructions based solely on individual decoded frames provided by the low-resolution broadcast.