Relevance of the Hölderian regularity-based interpolation for range-Doppler ISAR image post-processing

In ISAR processing, post-processing of the range Doppler image is useful to help the practitioner for ship recognition. Among the image post-processing tools, interpolation methods can be of interest especially when zooming. In this paper, we study the relevance of the Hölderian regularity-based interpolation. In that case, interpolating consists in adding a new scale in the wavelet transform and the new wavelet coefficients can be estimated from others. In the original method, initially proposed by two of the authors, the image is first interpolated along the rows and then along the columns. Concerning the diagonal pixels, they are estimated as the mean of the adjacent original and interpolated pixels. Here, we propose a variant where the diagonal pixels are estimated by taking into account the local orientation of the image. It has the advantage of conserving local regularity on all interpolated pixels of the image. A comparative study on synthetic data and real range-Doppler images is then carried out with alternative interpolation techniques such as the linear interpolation, the bicubic one, the nearest neighbour interpolation, etc. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the approach.