A selective sparse coding based fast super-resolution method for a side-scan sonar image

Efforts have been made to reconstruct low-resolution underwater images to high-resolution ones by using the image SR (Super-Resolution) method, all to improve efficiency when acquiring side-scan sonar images. As side-scan sonar images are similar with the optical images with respect to exploiting 2-dimensional signals, conventional image restoration methods for optical images can be considered as a solution. One of the most typical super-resolution methods for optical image is a sparse coding and there are studies for verifying applicability of sparse coding method for underwater images by analyzing sparsity of underwater images. Sparse coding is a method that obtains recovered signal from input signal by linear combination of dictionary and sparse coefficients. However, it requires huge computational load to accurately estimate sparse coefficients. In this study, a sparse coding based underwater image super-resolution method is applied while a selective reconstruction method for object region is suggested to reduce the processing time. For this method, this paper proposes an edge detection and object and non object region classification method for underwater images and combine it with sparse coding based image super-resolution method. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by reducing the processing time for image reconstruction over 32 % while preserving same level of PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) compared with conventional method.