Image interpolation with adaptive k ‐nearest neighbours search and random non‐linear regression

Abstract

Learning-based image interpolation methods have been proved to be effective in image interpolation. In this study, the authors propose an accurate image interpolation with adaptive k-nearest neighbour searching and non-linear regression. The proposed method aims to find k-nearest neighbours of the input image patch and use them to learn the non-linear mapping between low-resolution and high-resolution image patches. To be specific, they first divide the training image patches into many subspaces, then they utilise an adaptive robust and precise k nearest neighbour searching scheme with proposed normalised Gaussian similarity to find the k nearest neighbours in the matched subspace. The selected k image patch pairs are then used to learn the non-linear regression model through an extreme learning machine. Furthermore, the proposed interpolation method is a cascade framework that consists of two stages. Stage 2 takes the results of Stage 1 as input to further improve the performance. Extensive experimental results on commonly used test images and image datasets indicate that their proposed algorithm obtains competitive performance against the state-of-the-art methods both in terms of objective evaluation values and the subjective effect of reconstructed images.