An Edge-Preserving Iterative Back-Projection Method for Image Super-Resolution

As an effective super-resolution reconstruction technique, the original iterative back-projection (IBP) suffers from jaggy artifacts around the edge caused by the initial estimation of high-resolution image obtained with traditional interpolation methods like bilinear interpolation. In this paper, we present an edge-preserving iterative back-projection method for image super-resolution, which employs an effective edge-preserving interpolation method called iterative curvature based interpolation (ICBI) method for up-sampling to get the initial estimation of high-resolution image. The proposed method combines the IBP algorithm with the ICBI method which is a two-step grid filling and an iterative correction of the interpolated pixels obtained by minimizing an objective function depending on the second-order directional derivatives of the image intensity. Experiment results increases the PSNR compared to other existing algorithms and also improves edge quality of the image considerably.