A Fast Print-from-Video Technique for Cell-Phone Cameras

Print-from-video can be achieved by using super-resolution techniques. These techniques involve combining information from multiple low resolution images to generate and print a high resolution image. Among the existing super-resolution techniques, the most suitable one for deployment on portable consumer electronics products, in particular on cell-phones, that have limited processing and memory resources is the shift-and-add approach. However, this approach is known to generate artifacts when applied to real video sequences. This paper introduces a number of improvements made to the shift-and-add approach in terms of frame alignment, frame selection, and frame fusion to reduce such artifacts in computationally efficient manner. In addition, a post-processing step named pattern filtering is applied to reduce visual artifacts in printed images. The effectiveness of the developed solution is demonstrated by showing both quantitative and qualitative comparison results for video sequences captured by cell-phone cameras¹.