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6 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
where and are the -spatial, -spatial and
temporal derivative of
respectively. By substituting (11)
in (1 0) we get a quad ratic error function, which i s now linear
for its unknown
. Therefore, we obtain an analytic expression
for
:
(12)
where
and
.From(12)itseemsasifwe
can obtain the registration parameters
directly without itera-
tion. However, the estimator for
requires an estimator for ,
which also requires an estimator for
. Therefore, the expec-
tation-maximization ( EM) algorithm is used for s olvin g
,and
the whole algorithm procedure is defined as follows:
1) Initialization: assign the fixed constants
and , and pro-
vide initial estimate for
.
2) E-Step: compute
. This step also invo lves the pro cess of
classifying p ixels either into the
region or into the
region. Pixels belon gin g to have a close to zero weight.
3) M-Step: calculate
. This can be don e with the classical
differential method proposed in [7], which relies on a
Newton-Raphson style iterative scheme to approximate
the solution, and a Gaussian pyramid scheme to increase
the convergence speed.
4) The last two steps are repeated until the difference betw een
successive estimates of
falls below a small threshold
value.
3) Patch-Based Registration and Superresolution: In our ex -
periments the image patch size was set at 96
96 as a compro-
mise between accurate model adaptation and estimation. Once
image patches are accurately registered, it is important to elimi-
nate the blocking effect typical for patch-based approaches and
make sure that adjacent image patches match. There are two
ways to eliminate the blocking effect [23]: o ne is to apply an av-
eraging kernel with an appropriate size to smoo th the resulting
image, which will inevitably decrease the image qualit y; the
other is to div ide the image into overlapping blocks as show n
in Fig. 4, which is the method adopted in this pap er. In Fig. 4
the small tile is of size 48 by 48, and each image patch is com -
posed of four tiles. Using the moving window app ro ach, in t he
example there are 49 image patches all together instead of 16,
with the patch center indexed as i llustrated in Fig . 4. For any
image tile (except those near the edge) spatial consistency is
obtained by averaging the differences (geometric displacement,
photometric disparity and reconstructed discrepancy) for the
four floating patches the tile belongs to. By adopting this sliding
half-window m e th od, we can make sure that the transfo rmation
between images is locally affine but globally smooth.
The patch-based scheme has the following m erits for SR:
1) Although the global transform is not invertible, for each
patch the transform is invertible, therefore state-of-the-art
SR algorithms can be implemented in this scheme.
2) Remote sensing images often have a large size; therefore
the construction of the
matrix in (2) may p ose compu-
tational problems. Constructing the matrix at patch level
Fig. 4. An illustration of overlappin g image patches. The small tile is of size
48
48, and the image patch is composed of 4 tiles. The solid line represents the
positions of non-overlappin g image patches while the dashed lines denote the
sliding positions. The centers of overlapping image patches are indexed from 1
and 49. Only the image tiles shown in green can be processed using the approach
proposed.
is efficient and allows application of t he method on full-
size imagery. The patch-based scheme also enables par-
allel processing of SR.
3) Although patch-based image registration has been criti-
cized because image details may be overly smoothed, and a
polyaffine scheme has been proposed to solve this problem
[24], w e found that simple fusion of SR patches by aver-
aging d oes not deteriorate the SR result. In the spatially-
varying PSF image deconvoluti on literature, this simple fu-
sion method is comm on practice [20].
C. PSF E stimation and Construction of the H Matrix
From (2) we can see that the PSF that defines th e blur matrix
is applied on the und erlying HR image instead of on the LR
image. There are two ways to derive it, as follows:
1) One is referred to as the blind-SR metho d, which assu mes
that the HR image can be m odeled by means of an inho-
mogeneous image mod el such as the Potts-Markov model
[25]. However, the complexity of a remote sensing scene
often does not allow the use of this approach. Moreover,
the simultaneous estimation of t he PSF and the HR image
usually requires iteration and, therefore is computationally
heavy.
2) The other possibility is to first estimate the PSF of the L R
image and th en linking it to the PSF of the underlying HR
image. Compared to estimating the PSF blindly, on-orbit
determination of the PSF of LR images, where the PSF
is calculated by w ay of specific objects in the observ ed
images, is more reliable. The local affine assumption also
makes it easier to define the relationship b etween the PSF
of the LR i mage and that of the HR image. Therefore, in
this study this strategy is adopted .