Resolution enhancement of textual images: a survey of single image‐based methods

Abstract

Super-resolution (SR) task has become an important research area due to the rapidly growing interest for high quality images in various computer vision and pattern recognition applications. This has led to the emergence of various SR approaches. According to the number of input images, two kinds of approaches could be distinguished: single or multi-input based approaches. Certainly, processing multiple inputs could lead to an interesting output, but this is not the case mainly for textual image processing. This study focuses on single image-based approaches. Most of the existing methods have been successfully applied on natural images. Nevertheless, their direct application on textual images is not enough efficient due to the specificities that distinguish these particular images from natural images. Therefore, SR approaches especially suited for textual images are proposed in the literature. Previous overviews of SR methods have been concentrated on natural images application with no real application on the textual ones. Thus, this study aims to tackle this lack by surveying methods that are mainly designed for enhancing low-resolution textual images. The authors further criticise these methods and discuss areas which promise improvements in such task. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this survey is the first investigation in the literature.