Enhancement of imagery of objects with highly dynamic brightness and large rotational motion.

Abstract

We report on application of multi-frame super-resolution (SR) to sampling limited imagery that models space objects (SOs). The difficulties of multi-frame image processing of SOs include abrupt illumination changes and complex in scene SO motion. These conditions adversely affect the accuracy of motion estimation necessary for resolution enhancement. We analyze the motion estimation errors from the standpoint of an optical flow (OF) interpolation error metric and show dependence of the object tracking accuracy on brightness changes and on the pixel displacement values between subsequent images. Despite inaccuracies of motion estimation, we demonstrate spatial acuity enhancement of the pixel limited resolution of model SO motion imagery by applying a SR algorithm that accounts for OF errors. In addition to visual inspection, image resolution improvement attained in the experiments is assessed quantitatively; a 1.8× resolution enhancement is demonstrated.