Superresolution reconstruction of a video captured by a vibrated time delay and integration camera

Abstract

Various applications such as industrial product inspection or low signal-to-noise situations (as in thermal imaging) employ a time delay and integration (TDI) scanning imaging technique. Due to common vibration sources such as the camera platform motion or the thermal detector's cooling system, the acquired image may be degraded by severe shift-variant geometric distortions and motion blur. We use these vibrations in terms of superresolution to create an improved high-resolution video sequence from the degraded lower resolution sequence, in two main stages: subpixel motion estimation with respect to translations and rotations, used for point spread function (PSF) estimation, followed by an efficient implementation of the projection onto convex sets (POCS) method. We generalize and considerably improve a previous technique for restoration of a single image captured by a translational vibrated staggered-TDI camera (Hochman et al., 2004). The proposed method is implemented with both simulated videos and real degraded thermal videos. A comparative analysis shows an advantage of the proposed method over others in restoring the vibrated videos.