Perceptually-Inspired and Edge-Directed Color Image Super-Resolution

Abstract

Inspired by multi-scale tensor voting, a computational framework for perceptual grouping and segmentation, we propose an edge-directed technique for color image superresolution given a single low-resolution color image. Our multi-scale technique combines the advantages of edgedirected, reconstruction-based and learning-based methods, and is unique in two ways. First, we consider simultaneously all the three color channels in our multi-scale tensor voting framework to produce a multi-scale edge representation to guide the process of high-resolution color image reconstruction, which is subject to the back projection constraint. Fine details are inferred without noticeable blurry or ringing artifacts. Second, the inference of highresolution curves is achieved by multi-scale tensor voting, using the dense voting field as an edge-preserving smoothness prior which is derived geometrically without any timeconsuming learning procedure. Qualitative and quantitative results indicate that our method produces convincing results in complex test cases typically used by state-of-theart image super-resolution techniques.