Image hallucination with feature enhancement

Example-based super-resolution recovers missing high frequencies in a magnified image by learning the correspondence between co-occurrence examples at two different resolution levels. As high-resolution examples usually contain more details and are of higher dimensionality in comparison with low-resolution ones, the mapping from low-resolution to high-resolution is an ill-posed problem. Rather than imposing more complicated mapping constraints, we propose to improve the mapping accuracy by enhancing low-resolution examples in terms of mapped features, e.g., derivatives and primitives. A feature enhancement method is presented through a combination of interpolation with prefiltering and non-blind sparse prior deblurring. By enhancing low-resolution examples, unique feature information carried by high-resolution examples is decreased. This regularization reduces the intrinsic dimensionality disparity between two different resolution examples and thus improves the feature mapping accuracy. Experiments demonstrate our super-resolution scheme with feature enhancement produces high quality results both perceptually and quantitatively.