An efficient and robust multi-frame image super-resolution reconstruction using orthogonal Fourier-Mellin moments

Abstract

Multi-frame image super-resolution (SR) has recently become an active area of research. The orthogonal rotation invariant moments (ORIMs) have several useful characteristics which make them very suitable for multi-frame image super-resolution application. Among the various ORIMs, Zernike moments (ZMs) and pseudo-Zernike moments (PZMs)-based SR approaches, i.e., NLM-ZMs and NLM-PZMs, have already shown improved SR performances for multi-frame image super-resolution. However, it is a well-known fact that among many ORIMs, orthogonal Fourier-Mellin moments (OFMMs) demonstrate better noise robustness and image representation capabilities for small images as compared to ZMs and PZMs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multi-frame image super-resolution approach using OFMMs. The proposed approach is based on the NLM framework because of its inherent capability of estimating motion implicitly. We have referred to this proposed approach as NLM-OFMMs-I. Also, a novel idea of using OFMMs-based interpolation in place of traditional Lanczos interpolation for obtaining an initial estimate of HR sequence has been presented in this paper. This variant of the proposed approach is referred to as NLM-OFMMs-II. Detailed experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed OFMMs-based SR approaches to generate high-quality HR images in the presence of factors like image noise, global motion, local motion, and rotation in between the image frames.