Image Enlargement by Nonlinear Frequency Extrapolation with Morphological Operators

Masayuki SHIMIZU  Makoto NAKASHIZUKA  Youji IIGUNI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E91-A   No.3   pp.859-867
Publication Date: 2008/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1093/ietfec/e91-a.3.859
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Image
Keyword: 
image enhancement,  image enlargement,  Laplacian pyramid,  morphology,  morphological reconstruction,  

Full Text: PDF>>
Buy this Article



Summary: 
In this paper, we propose an image enlargement method by using morphological operators. Our enlargement method is based on the nonlinear frequency extrapolation method (Greenspan et al., 2000) by using a Laplacian pyramid image representation. In this method, the sampling process of input images is modeled as the Laplacian pyramid. A high resolution image is obtained with the finer scale Laplacian that is extrapolated by a nonlinear operation from a low resolution Laplacian. In this paper, we propose a novel nonlinear operation for extrapolation of the finer scale Laplacian. Our nonlinear operation is realized by morphological operators and is capable of generating the finer scale Laplacian, the amplitude of which is proportional to contrasts of edges that appear in the low resolution image. In experiments, the enlargement results given by the proposed method are demonstrated. Compared with the Greenspan's method, the proposed method can recover sharp intensity transients of image edges with small artifacts.