Fast image super-resolution using Connected Component enhancement

The paper focuses on reconstructing the discontinuity between homogenous color regions in an interpolated image to improve its perceptual quality. A low-resolution input image is firstly interpolated and then decomposed into several patches. Each patch is then segmented into multiple homogenous regions using connected component analysis technique. Then a spatial-filter is applied to enhance the color/intensity transition between neighboring components. The designed spatial-filter combines the advantages of both bilateral-filtering and unsharp masking methods, with high computational efficiency. The proposed method can be used for image/video super-resolution applications. Experimental results are promising.