Image Mosaicing and Super-Resolution

The Distinguished Dissertation Series is published on behalf of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and the British Computer Society, who annually select the best British PhD dissertations in computer science for publication. The dissertations are selected on behalf of the CPHC by a panel of eight academics. Each dissertation chosen makes a noteworthy contribution to the subject and reaches a high standard of exposition, placing all results clearly in the context of computer science as a whole. In this way computer scientists with significantly different interests are able to grasp the essentials - or even find a means of entry - to an unfamiliar research topic. This book investigates how information contained in multiple, overlapping images of a scene may be combined to produce images of superior quality. This offers possibilities such as noise reduction, extended field of view, blur removal, increased spatial resolution and improved dynamic range. Potential applications cover fields as diverse as forensic video restoration, remote sensing, video compression and digital video editing. The book covers two aspects that have attracted particular attention in recent years: image mosaicing, whereby multiple images are aligned to produce a large composite; and super-resolution, which permits restoration at an increased resolution of poor quality video sequences by modelling and removing imaging degradations including noise, blur and spacial-sampling. It contains a comprehensive coverage and analysis of existing techniques, and describes in detail novel, powerful and automatic algorithms (based on a robust, statistical framework) for applying mosaicing and super-resolution. The algorithms may be implemented directly from the descriptions given here. A particular feature of the techniques is that it is not necessary to know the camera parameters (such as position and focal length) in order to apply them. Throughout the book, examples are given on real image sequences, covering a variety of applications including: the separation of latent marks in forensic images; the automatic creation of 360 panoramic mosaics; and super-resolution restoration of various scenes, text, and faces in lw-quality video.