Super Resolution for Remote Sensing Images Based on a Universal Hidden Markov Tree Model

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new super resolution (SR) method called the maximum a posteriori based on a universal Hidden Markov Tree (HMT) model for remote sensing images. The HMT theory is first used to set up a prior model for reconstructing super resolved images from a sequence of warped, blurred, subsampled, and noise-contaminated low-resolution (LR) images. Because the wavelet coefficients of images can be well characterized as a mixed Gaussian distribution, an HMT model is better able to capture the dependences between multiscale wavelet coefficients. The new method is tested first against simulated LR views from a single Landsat7 panchromatic scene and, then, with actual data from four Landsat7 panchromatic images captured on different dates. Both tests show that our method achieves better SR results both visually and quantitatively than other methods.