Anisotropic Interpolation of Sparse Generalized Image Samples

Practical image-acquisition systems are often modeled as a continuous-domain prefilter followed by an ideal sampler, where generalized samples are obtained after convolution with the impulse response of the device. In this paper, our goal is to interpolate images from a given subset of such samples. We express our solution in the continuous domain, considering consistent resampling as a data-fidelity constraint. To make the problem well posed and ensure edge-preserving solutions, we develop an efficient anisotropic regularization approach that is based on an improved version of the edge-enhancing anisotropic diffusion equation. Following variational principles, our reconstruction algorithm minimizes successive quadratic cost functionals. To ensure fast convergence, we solve the corresponding sequence of linear problems by using multigrid iterations that are specifically tailored to their sparse structure. We conduct illustrative experiments and discuss the potential of our approach both in terms of algorithmic design and reconstruction quality. In particular, we present results that use as little as 2% of the image samples.