Adaptive rational fractal interpolation function for image super-resolution via local fractal analysis

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. Image super-resolution aims to generate high-resolution image based on the given low-resolution image and to recover the details of the image. The common approaches include reconstruction-based methods and interpolation-based methods. However, these existing methods show difficulty in processing the regions of an image with complicated texture. To tackle such problems, fractal geometry is applied on image super-resolution, which demonstrates its advantages when describing the complicated details in an image. The common fractal-based method regards the whole image as a single fractal set. That is, it does not distinguish the complexity difference of texture across all regions of an image regardless of smooth regions or texture rich regions. Due to such strong presumption, it causes artificial errors while recovering smooth area and texture blurring at the regions with rich texture. In this paper, the proposed method produces rational fractal interpolation model with various setting at different regions to adapt to the local texture complexity. In order to facilitate such mechanism, the proposed method is able to segment the image region according to its complexity which is determined by its local fractal dimension. Thus, the image super-resolution process is cast to an optimization problem where local fractal dimension in each region is further optimized until the optimization convergence is reached. During the optimization (i.e. super-resolution), the overall image complexity (determined by local fractal dimension) is maintained. Compared with state-of-the-art method, the proposed method shows promising performance according to qualitative evaluation and quantitative evaluation

Image Super-Resolution Based on Fractal Analysis

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Image super-resolution is an important problem in the computer vision field. Image super-resolution aims to generate high-resolution images with an ‘ideal’ appearance from low-resolution ones. From traditional interpolation methods (bilinear, bicubic et al.) to CNN methods, the quality of reconstructed HR image is highly improved. However, most of these methods are failing to keep texture details and edge structure, especially in highly complicated texture area. To tackle such problems, fractal geometry is applied to image super-resolution, which demonstrates its advantages when describing the complicated details in an image. The common fractal-based method does not distinguish the complexity difference of texture across all regions of image regardless of smooth regions or texture-rich regions. Due to such strong presumption, it causes artificial errors while recovering smooth area and texture blurring at the regions with rich texture. This thesis firstly proposes a rational fractal interpolation model with various setting in different regions to adapt to the local texture complexity. Secondly, it should keep the degree of image roughness non-decreasing, which reflects various texture features and appearance during the image super-resolution process. However, this point is not well addressed in the current work. This thesis argues that reducing roughness during image super-resolution is the key reason causing various problems such as artificial texture and/or edge blur. Here, keeping the image roughness non-decreasing during super-resolution is being well investigated for the first time to our best knowledge. Thirdly, fine details are more related to the information in the high-frequency spectrum on the Fourier domain. Most of the existing methods do not have specific modules to handle such high-frequency information adaptively. Thus, they cause edge blur or texture disorder. To tackle the problems, this thesis explores image super-resolution on multiple sub-bands of the corresponding image, which are generated by NonSubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT). Different sub-bands hold the information of different frequency which is then related to the detailedness of information of the given low-resolution image. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves encouraging performance with state-of-the-art super-resolution algorithms

Normalized Weighting Schemes for Image Interpolation Algorithms

This paper presents and evaluates four weighting schemes for image interpolation algorithms. The first scheme is based on the normalized area of the circle, whose diameter is equal to the minimum side of a tetragon. The second scheme is based on the normalized area of the circle, whose radius is equal to the hypotenuse. The third scheme is based on the normalized area of the triangle, whose base and height are equal to the hypotenuse and virtual pixel length, respectively. The fourth weighting scheme is based on the normalized area of the circle, whose radius is equal to the virtual pixel length-based hypotenuse. Experiments demonstrated debatable algorithm performances and the need for further research.Comment: 8 pages, 14 figure

Content adaptive single image interpolation based super resolution of compressed images

Image Super resolution is used to upscale the low resolution Images. It is also known as image upscaling .This paper focuses on upscaling of compressed images based on Interpolation techniques. A content adaptive interpolation method of image upscaling has been proposed. This interpolation based scheme is useful for single image based Super-resolution (SR) methods .The presented method works on horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions of an image separately and it is adaptive to the local content of an image. This method relies only on single image and uses the content of the original image only; therefore the proposed method is more practical and realistic. The simulation results have been compared to other standard methods with the help of various performance matrices like PSNR, MSE, MSSIM etc. which indicates the preeminence of the proposed method

TMP: Temporal Motion Propagation for Online Video Super-Resolution

Online video super-resolution (online-VSR) highly relies on an effective alignment module to aggregate temporal information, while the strict latency requirement makes accurate and efficient alignment very challenging. Though much progress has been achieved, most of the existing online-VSR methods estimate the motion fields of each frame separately to perform alignment, which is computationally redundant and ignores the fact that the motion fields of adjacent frames are correlated. In this work, we propose an efficient Temporal Motion Propagation (TMP) method, which leverages the continuity of motion field to achieve fast pixel-level alignment among consecutive frames. Specifically, we first propagate the offsets from previous frames to the current frame, and then refine them in the neighborhood, which significantly reduces the matching space and speeds up the offset estimation process. Furthermore, to enhance the robustness of alignment, we perform spatial-wise weighting on the warped features, where the positions with more precise offsets are assigned higher importance. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed TMP method achieves leading online-VSR accuracy as well as inference speed. The source code of TMP can be found at https://github.com/xtudbxk/TMP

Fractal image compression and the self-affinity assumption : a stochastic signal modelling perspective

Bibliography: p. 208-225.Fractal image compression is a comparatively new technique which has gained considerable attention in the popular technical press, and more recently in the research literature. The most significant advantages claimed are high reconstruction quality at low coding rates, rapid decoding, and "resolution independence" in the sense that an encoded image may be decoded at a higher resolution than the original. While many of the claims published in the popular technical press are clearly extravagant, it appears from the rapidly growing body of published research that fractal image compression is capable of performance comparable with that of other techniques enjoying the benefit of a considerably more robust theoretical foundation. . So called because of the similarities between the form of image representation and a mechanism widely used in generating deterministic fractal images, fractal compression represents an image by the parameters of a set of affine transforms on image blocks under which the image is approximately invariant. Although the conditions imposed on these transforms may be shown to be sufficient to guarantee that an approximation of the original image can be reconstructed, there is no obvious theoretical reason to expect this to represent an efficient representation for image coding purposes. The usual analogy with vector quantisation, in which each image is considered to be represented in terms of code vectors extracted from the image itself is instructive, but transforms the fundamental problem into one of understanding why this construction results in an efficient codebook. The signal property required for such a codebook to be effective, termed "self-affinity", is poorly understood. A stochastic signal model based examination of this property is the primary contribution of this dissertation. The most significant findings (subject to some important restrictions} are that "self-affinity" is not a natural consequence of common statistical assumptions but requires particular conditions which are inadequately characterised by second order statistics, and that "natural" images are only marginally "self-affine", to the extent that fractal image compression is effective, but not more so than comparable standard vector quantisation techniques

Information Extraction and Modeling from Remote Sensing Images: Application to the Enhancement of Digital Elevation Models

To deal with high complexity data such as remote sensing images presenting metric resolution over large areas, an innovative, fast and robust image processing system is presented. The modeling of increasing level of information is used to extract, represent and link image features to semantic content. The potential of the proposed techniques is demonstrated with an application to enhance and regularize digital elevation models based on information collected from RS images