A Frequency Domain Approach to Registration of Aliased Images with Application to Super-Resolution

Super-resolution algorithms reconstruct a high resolution image from a set of low resolution images of a scene. Precise alignment of the input images is an essential part of such algorithms. If the low resolution images are undersampled and have aliasing artifacts, the performance of standard registration algorithms decreases. We propose a frequency domain technique to precisely register a set of aliased images, based on their low-frequency, aliasing-free part. A high resolution image is then reconstructed using cubic interpolation. Our algorithm is compared to other algorithms in simulations and practical experiments using real aliased images. Both show very good visual results and prove the attractivity of our approach in the case of aliased input images. A possible application is to digital cameras where a set of rapidly acquired images can be used to recover a higher resolution final image.