Low-Resolution and Low-Quality Face Super-Resolution in Monitoring Scene via Support-Driven Sparse Coding

Abstract

Monitoring cameras are now widely used to monitor everything from a room in a house to an entire warehouse. However, in real monitoring scenarios, a variety of factors, such as underexposure, optical blurring, defocusing, have an impact on the quality of images, which leads to low-quality and low-resolution (LR) of the individual of interest. Reconstruction of a high-resolution (HR) face image with detailed facial features, from a LR observation based on a set of HR and LR training image pairs, plays an important role in computer vision and face image analysis applications. To super-resolve an HR face given a LR face image, the key issue is how to effectively encode the LR image patch. However, due to stability and accuracy issues, the coding approaches proposed so far are far from satisfactory. In this paper, we present a novel sparse coding method via exploiting the support information on the coding coefficients. According to the distances between the input patch and bases in the dictionary, we first assign different weights to the coding coefficients and then obtain the coding coefficients by solving a weighted sparse problem. Experiments on commonly used databases and some face images on the real monitoring conditions demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art.