UHD image reconstruction by estimating interpolation error

Abstract

With the emerging ultra high definition (UHD) TV technology, the reconstruction of UHD images from transmitted HD images on the receiver's side is of great interests to save bandwidth and be compatible to existing HDTV systems. In this paper, a UHD image reconstruction algorithm is proposed for the UHDTV broadcasting system. A transmitted HD image at the receiver side is first up sampled to UHD resolution, then the error map between the interpolated UHD image and the original UHD image is estimated. The final reconstructed UHD image is the sum of the interpolated UHD image and the estimated UHD error map. There are two steps to estimate the content of the UHD error map: 1) key point detection and prediction estimate the location of the pixels with large error and create a spline tube between two adjacent key points; 2) spline-tube interpolation estimate the error value along the spline tube. Our simulation results on six images show that the proposed reconstruction method performs better than conventional up sampling without estimating the error map.