Multi-sensor image super-resolution with fuzzy cluster by using multi-scale and multi-view sparse coding for infrared image

Super-resolution (SR) methods are effective for generating a high-resolution image from a single low-resolution image. However, four problems are observed in existing SR methods. (1) They cannot reconstruct many details from a low-resolution infrared image because infrared images always lack detailed information. (2) They cannot extract the desired information from images because they do not consider that images naturally come at different scales in many cases. (3) They fail to reveal different physical structures of low-resolution patch because they extract features from a single view. (4) They fail to extract all the different patterns because they use only one dictionary to represent all patterns. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel SR method for infrared images. First, we combine the information of high-resolution visible light images and low-resolution infrared images to improve the resolution of infrared images. Second, we use multiscale patches instead of fixed-size patches to represent infrared images more accurately. Third, we use different feature vectors rather than a single feature to represent infrared images. Finally, we divide training patches into several clusters, and multiple dictionaries are learned for each cluster to provide each patch with a more accurate dictionary. In the proposed method, clustering information for low-resolution patches is learnt by using fuzzy clustering theory. Experiments validate that the proposed method yields better results in terms of quantization and visual perception than the state-of-the-art algorithms.