SINGLE-FRAME SIGNAL RECOVERY USING A
SIMILARITY-PRIOR BASED ON PEARSON TYPE VII MRF
Sakinah Ali Pitchay and Ata Kab´an
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, U.K.
Keywords:
Single frame super-resolution, Compressive sensing, Similarity prior, Image recovery.
Abstract:
We consider the problem of signal reconstruction from noisy observations in a highly under-determined prob-
lem setting. Most of previous work does not consider any specific extra information to recover the signal.
Here we address this problem by exploiting the similarity between the signal of interest and a consecutive
motionless frame. We incorporate this additional information of similarity that is available into a probabilistic
image prior based on the Pearson type VII Markov Random Field model. Results on both synthetic and real
data of MRI images demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both compressed setting and classical
super-resolution experiments.
1 INTRODUCTION
Conventional image super-resolution (SR) aims to re-
cover a high resolution scene from a single or multi-
ple frames of low resolution measurements. A noisy
frame of a single low resolution image or signal often
suffers from a blur and down-sampling transforma-
tion. The problem is more challenging when the ob-
served data is a single low resolution frame because
it contains fewer measurements than the number of
unknown pixels of the high resolution scene that we
aim to recover. This makes the problem ill-posed and
under-determined too. For this reason, some addi-
tional prior knowledge is vital to obtain a satisfactory
solution. We have demonstrated in previous work (A.
Kab´an and S. AliPitchay, 2011) that the Pearson type
VII density integrated with Markov Random Fields
(MRF) is an appropriate approach for this purpose.
In this paper, we tackle the problem using a more
specific prior information, namely the similarity to a
motionless consecutive frame as the additional input
for recovering the signals of interest in a highly under-
determined setting. This has real applications e.g.
in medical imaging where such frames are obtained
from several scans. Previous work in (N. Vaswani
and W. Lu, 2010) found the average frame from those
scans to be useful for recovery.
In principle, the more information we have about
the recovered signal, the better the recovery algorithm
is expected to perform. This hypothesis seems to
work in (JCR. Giraldo et al., 2010; N. Vaswani and
W. Lu, 2010), however both of these works require
us to tune the free parameters of the model manu-
ally, and (JCR. Giraldo et al., 2010) reckons that the
range of parameter values was not exhaustivelytested.
(N. Vaswani and W. Lu, 2010) also mentions that
they were not able to attain exact reconstruction us-
ing fewer measurements than those needed by com-
pressed sensing (CS) for a small image. By contrary,
in this paper we will demonstrate good recovery from
very few measurements using a probabilistic model
that includes an automated estimation of its hyper-
parameters.
Related work on sparse reconstruction gained
tremendous interest recently and can be found in e.g.
(R. G. Baraniuk et al., 2010; S. Ji et al., 2008; E. Can-
des et al., 2006; DL. Donoho, 2006). The sparser a
signal is, in some basis, the fewer random measure-
ments are sufficient for its recovery. However these
works do not consider any specific extra information
that could be used to accentuate the sparsity, which is
our focus. Somewhat related, the recent work in (W.
Lu and N. Vaswani, 2011) exploits partial erroneous
information to recover small image sequences.
This paper is aimed at taking these ideas further
through a more principled and more comprehensive
treatment. We consider the case when the observed
frame contains too few measurements, but an addi-
tional motionless consecutive scene in high resolu-
tions is provided as an extra input. This assumption
is often realistic in imaging applications. Our aim is
to reduce the requirements on the number of mea-
123
Ali Pitchay S. and Kabán A. (2012).
SINGLE-FRAME SIGNAL RECOVERY USING A SIMILARITY-PRIOR BASED ON PEARSON TYPE VII MRF.
In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods, pages 123-133
DOI: 10.5220/0003791401230133
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