Talks

From SD to HD: Improving Video Sequences Through Super-Resolution
November 10th, 2011
Haifa, Special Workshop for "final" employees. This presentation covers material that speards over 2 decades of my research activity

Multi-channel TV broadcast, Internet video and You-Tube, home DVD movies, video conference calls, cellular video calls and more – there is no doubt that videos are abundant and in everyday use. In many cases, the quality of the available video is poor, something commonly referred to as “low-resolution”. As an example, High-definition (HD) TV’s are commonly sold these days to customers that hope to enjoy a better viewing experience. Nevertheless, most TV broadcast today is still done in standard-definition (SD), leading to poor image quality on these screens. The field of Super-Resolution deals with ways to improve video content to increase optical resolution. The core idea: fusion of the visual content in several images can be performed and this can lead to a better resolution outcome. For years it has been assumed that such fusion requires knowing the exact motion the objects undergo within the scene. Since this motion may be quite complex in general, this stood as a major obstacle for industrial applications. Three years ago a break-through has been made in this field, allowing to bypass the need for exact motion estimation. In this lecture we shall survey the work in this field from its early days (25 years ago) and till very recently, and show the evolution of ideas and results obtained. No prior knowledge in image processing is required.

Joinly done with various collaborators in different periods of times: Arie Feuer (1994-1997), Yacov Hel-Or (1999), Peyman Milanfar and Sina Farsiu (2001-2005), and Matan Protter (2006-2011). These slides were adapted from Matan's talk - see his site