Accurate image registration for MAP image super-resolution

The accuracy of image registration plays a dominant role in image super-resolution methods and in the related literature, landmark-based registration methods have gained increasing acceptance in this framework. In this work, we take advantage of a maximum a posteriori (MAP) scheme for image super-resolution in conjunction with the maximization of mutual information to improve image registration for super-resolution imaging. Local as well as global motion in the low-resolution images is considered. The overall scheme consists of two steps. At first, the low-resolution images are registered by establishing correspondences between image features. The second step is to fine-tune the registration parameters along with the high-resolution image estimation, using the maximization of mutual information criterion. Quantitative and qualitative results are reported indicating the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which is evaluated with different image features and MAP image super-resolution computation methods. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.