Wavelet Fusion: a Tool to Break the Limits on LMMSE Image Super-Resolution

This paper presents a wavelet-based computationally efficient implementation of the Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE) algorithm in image super-resolution. The image super-resolution reconstruction problem is well-known to be an ill-posed inverse problem of large dimensions. The LMMSE estimator to be implemented in the image super-resolution reconstruction problem requires an inversion of a very large dimension matrix, which is practically impossible. Our suggested implementation is based on breaking the problem into four consecutive steps, a registration step, a multi-channel LMMSE restoration step, a wavelet-based image fusion step and an LMMSE image interpolation step. The objective of the wavelet fusion step is to integrate the data obtained from each observation into a single image, which is then interpolated to give a high-resolution image. The paper explains the implementation of each step. The proposed implementation has succeeded in obtaining a high-resolution image from multiple degraded observations with a high PSNR. The computation time of the suggested implementation is small when compared to traditional iterative image super-resolution algorithms.