Directional interpolation of noisy images
Most of the existing image interpolation schemes assume that the image is noise free. This assumption is invalid in practice because noise will be corrupted in the image acquisition process. The conventional way is to denoise the image first and then interpolate the denoised image. The denoising process, however, may smooth much the image details and introduce some artifacts, which could be amplified in the interpolation process. This paper presents a directional estimation scheme to implement denoising and interpolation simultaneously. For each noisy sample, we compute multiple directional estimates of it and then fuse them for a more accurate output. The estimation parameters computed in the denoising process can be subsequently used for interpolation. Compared with the schemes that perform denoising and interpolation in tandem, the proposed method can better reproduce the image fine structures and reduce much the interpolation artifacts.