Edge direction preserving image zooming: A mathematical and numerical analysis. (English) Zbl 1001.68174

Malgouyres, F.; Guichard, F.

SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 39, No. 1, 1-37 (2001).

Summary: We focus in this paper on some reconstruction/restoration methods whose aim is to improve the resolution of digital images. The main point here is to study the ability of such methods to preserve one-dimensional (1D) structures. Indeed, such structures are important since they are often carried by the image ”edges.” First we focus on linear methods, give a general framework to design them, and show that the preservation of 1D structures pleads in favor of the cancellation of the periodization of the image spectrum. More precisely, we show that preserving 1D structures implies the linear methods to be written as a convolution of the “sinc interpolation”. As a consequence, we cannot cope linearly with Gibbs effects, sharpness of the results, and the preservation of the 1D structure. Second, we study variational nonlinear methods and, in particular, the one based on total variation. We show that this latter permits us to avoid these shortcomings. We also prove the existence and consistency of an approximate solution to this variational problem. At last, this theoretical study is highlighted by experiments, both on synthetic and natural images, which show the effects of the described methods on images as well as on their spectrum.

MSC:

68U10	Computing methodologies for image processing
65C20	Probabilistic models, generic numerical methods in probability and statistics
42B05	Fourier series and coefficients in several variables
65D15	Algorithms for approximation of functions

Keywords:

image reconstruction; image restoration; image interpolation; Fourier analysis; variational methods; total variation; numerical approximation