Preliminary version of the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.04126

Abstract

Single image super resolution (SISR) is an ill-posed problem aiming at estimating plausible high resolution (HR) image from a single low resolution (LR) image. Current state-of- the-art SISR methods are patch-based. They use either external data or internal self-similarity to learn a prior for a HR image. External data based methods utilize large number of patches from the training data, while self-similarity based approaches use a highly relevant matching patch from the input image as a prior. In this paper, we aim at combining the ideas from both paradigms, i.e. we learn a prior for a patch using a large number of patches collected from the input image. We show that this results in a strong prior. The performance of the proposed algorithm, which is based on iterative collaborative filtering with back-projection, is evaluated on a number of benchmark super- resolution image datasets. Without using any external data, the proposed approach outperforms the current non-CNN based methods on tested standard datasets for various scaling factors. On certain datasets a gain is over 1 dB compared to the recent method A+. For high sampling rates (x4 and higher) the proposed method performs similar to very recent state-of-the-art deep convolutional network-based approaches.

Software

The following software is released under TUT limited license. It can only be used for non-profit education and scientific research. Any unauthorized use of the software for industrial or profit-oriented activities is expressively prohibited.

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You can find the usage instructions enclosed.

The current software version is compatible with Matlab 2011a 64 bit, or more recent, for both Windows and Linux.

Changelog

v1.0.0: Initial release.

v1.0.1: Update software release.

  • Add binary components compatible with Matlab R2011a;

  • Add binary components for Windows;

  • Add missing files in the testbench;

  • Minor bugfixes in the testbench.

v1.0.2: Update software release.

  • Make Linux binaries compatible with old glibc versions.

  • Add fallback psnr function for old Matlab releases.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Academy of Finland, project no. 287150, 2015-2019, and European Union’s H2020 Framework Programme (H2020- MSCA-ITN-2014) under grant agreement no. 642685 MacSeNet.

The binary components GroupProcessor and BlockMatch present in the distribution were provided by the authors of BM3D.