Fusing soft-decision-adaptive and bicubic methods for image interpolation

In this paper, a novel image fusion based interpolation method is proposed. Soft-decision-adaptive interpolation (SAI) is one of the state of the art image interpolation algorithms. However, SAI may produce serious artifacts in small-scale edge areas. Bicubic interpolation performs better in preserving the fidelity of small-scale edges. But, bicubic interpolation may cause zigzag and blurring artifacts around strong edges. The proposed method combines the advantages of SAI and Bicubic together through image fusion. The artifacts in the SAI interpolated image are first detected and then removed by fusing the SAI interpolated image with the bicubic interpolated image. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.