Super-resolution with the Help of Active Camera

In a digital optical imaging system, image resolution is constrained by several factors, including focus plane array pitch and optics. Super-resolution approaches aim at overcoming some of these limits by incorporating additional information of the object and/or combining several pictures of the same object, taken with sub-pixel displacements between each other. As shown by some authors, the obtainable zoom factor using the second approach has an upper limit, determined by the signal-to-noise ratio of the image taken. Moreover, as discussed later in this paper, lines at some pitch are indistinguishable, further lowering this limit. Here, an approach to overcome this using active camera and employing images of different relative scales is introduced. The choice of these scales is commented. The results from two experiments, using simulated and real set-up are presented and discussed.