Image Interpolation by Adaptive 2-D Autoregressive Modeling and Soft-Decision Estimation

  • Authors:

  • Xiangjun Zhang;Xiaolin Wu

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., McMaster Univ., Hamilton, ON;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The challenge of image interpolation is to preserve spatial details. We propose a soft-decision interpolation technique that estimates missing pixels in groups rather than one at a time. The new technique learns and adapts to varying scene structures using a 2-D piecewise autoregressive model. The model parameters are estimated in a moving window in the input low-resolution image. The pixel structure dictated by the learnt model is enforced by the soft-decision estimation process onto a block of pixels, including both observed and estimated. The result is equivalent to that of a high-order adaptive nonseparable 2-D interpolation filter. This new image interpolation approach preserves spatial coherence of interpolated images better than the existing methods, and it produces the best results so far over a wide range of scenes in both PSNR measure and subjective visual quality. Edges and textures are well preserved, and common interpolation artifacts (blurring, ringing, jaggies, zippering, etc.) are greatly reduced.