Single-image super-resolution reconstruction via learned geometric dictionaries and clustered sparse coding.

Recently, single image super-resolution reconstruction (SISR) via sparse coding has attracted increasing interest. In this paper, we proposed a multiple-geometric-dictionaries-based clustered sparse coding scheme for SISR. Firstly, a large number of high-resolution (HR) image patches are randomly extracted from a set of example training images and clustered into several groups of "geometric patches," from which the corresponding "geometric dictionaries" are learned to further sparsely code each local patch in a low-resolution image. A clustering aggregation is performed on the HR patches recovered by different dictionaries, followed by a subsequent patch aggregation to estimate the HR image. Considering that there are often many repetitive image structures in an image, we add a self-similarity constraint on the recovered image in patch aggregation to reveal new features and details. Finally, the HR residual image is estimated by the proposed recovery method and compensated to better preserve the subtle details of the images. Some experiments test the proposed method on natural images, and the results show that the proposed method outperforms its counterparts in both visual fidelity and numerical measures.