Image enlargement as an edge estimation

A robust image enlargement algorithm is presented in this paper. We formulate the image enlargement process as an edge information estimation process. In order to achieve a higher resolution, we first perform pixel duplication [W.K. Pratt, 1991] on the target image to form an initial high resolution image. Then the edge details of the enlarged image are estimated by using a novel neural network called "agent swarm regression network ASRN", which is trained by a set of low resolution (LR) / high resolution (HR) image patch pairs. Two benchmark images were used to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results show that the enlarged images by the proposed algorithm are sharper than those by the conventional methods.