Single image super-resolution via 2D nonlocal sparse representation

Image super-resolution based on sparse model with patch clustering and nonlocal similarity provides promising performance. However, the traditional one dimensional (1D) sparse model enforces a 1D dictionary for every cluster of patches to capture complex structures and different features in images. The total dictionary will take expensive memory, which can be alleviated at cost of representation power. Recently, two dimensional (2D) sparse model has been proved to efficiently represent images and save memory usage. In this paper, we propose to integrate 2D sparse model with patch clustering and nonlocal similarity into a variational framework as 2D nonlocal sparse representation (2DNSR) for image SR to save memory cost and ensure SR performances. We also present a 2DNSR algorithm for image SR where each group of similar patches decompose on the respective 2D dictionaries. Experimental results on image SR demonstrate our proposed 2D nonlocal representation outperforms 2D sparse model and achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art 1D nonlocal sparse models whereas with much less memory costs.