Remote sensing image super-resolution via regional spatially adaptive total variation model

Total variation has been used as a popular and effective image prior model in the regularization-based image processing fields. However, as the total variation model favors a piecewise constant solution, the processing result under high noise intensity in the flat regions of the image is often poor, and some “pseudo-edges” are produced. In this paper, we develop a regional spatially adaptive total variation (RSATV) model. Firstly, the spatial information is extracted based on each pixel, and then two filtering processes are respectively added to suppress the effect of “pseudo-edges”. After that, the spatial information weight is constructed and classified with k-means clustering, and the regularization strength in each region is controlled by the clustering center value. The experimental results, on both simulated and real datasets, show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the “pseudo-edges” of the total variation regularization in the flat regions, and maintain the partial smoothness of the high-resolution image. More importantly, compared with the traditional pixel-based spatial information adaptive approach, the proposed region-based spatial information adaptive total variation model can better avoid the effect of noise on the spatial information extraction, and maintains robustness with changes in the noise intensity in the super-resolution process.