Example-based image super-resolution with class-specific predictors

Example-based super-resolution is a promising approach to solving the image super-resolution problem. However, the learning process can be slow and prediction can be inaccurate. In this paper, we present a novel learning-based algorithm for image super-resolution to improve the computational speed and prediction accuracy. Our new method classifies image patches into several classes, for each class, a class-specific predictor is designed. A class-specific predictor takes a low-resolution image patch as input and predicts a corresponding high-resolution patch as output. The performances of the class-specific predictors are evaluated using different datasets formed by face images and natural-scene images. We present experimental results which demonstrate that the new method provides improved performances over existing methods. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Inc.