Image Super-Resolution Based on Sparse Representation via Direction and Edge Dictionaries

Sparse representation has recently attracted enormous interests in the field of image super-resolution. The sparsity-based methods usually train a pair of global dictionaries. However, only a pair of global dictionaries cannot best sparsely represent different kinds of image patches, as it neglects two most important image features: edge and direction. In this paper, we propose to train two novel pairs of Direction and Edge dictionaries for super-resolution. For single-image super-resolution, the training image patches are, respectively, divided into two clusters by two new templates representing direction and edge features. For each cluster, a pair of Direction and Edge dictionaries is learned. Sparse coding is combined with the Direction and Edge dictionaries to realize super-resolution. The above single-image super-resolution can restore the faithful high-frequency details, and the POCS is convenient for incorporating any kind of constraints or priors. Therefore, we combine the two methods to realize multiframe super-resolution. Extensive experiments on image super-resolution are carried out to validate the generality, effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can recover better edge structure and details.