Resolution Improvement of Infrared Images Using Visible Image Information

Abstract

This letter presents a new framework for improving the spatial resolution of infrared (IR) images based on the high-resolution visible image information. Edge regions in an IR image, which have a strong correlation with the aligned edges in the visible image, are sharpened by using their high frequency patches, which are locally estimated from the visible image. The estimation is performed on the basis of intensity correlations between two images. In addition, in order to improve the resolution in the uncorrelated edge regions and the texture regions where visible image information is not available, we adopt learning-based and reconstruction-based super resolution algorithms, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the spatial resolution compared with the existing upsampling algorithms.