On the well-posedness of a tensor-based second order PDE with bilateral term for image super-resolution

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a second-order equation based on a diffusion tensor combined with a bilateral total variation (BTV) term that takes the benefit from the diffusion model of Perona-Malik in the homogeneous regions, the Weickert model near sharp edge and the BTV term in reducing blur. Compared to the other partial differential equations (PDE) used in the SR context, the proposed super-resolution (SR) PDE can efficiently preserve image components such as corners and flat regions with less apparition of blur in homogeneous regions. Moreover, since the SR approaches are always ill-posed, a mathematical study of the existence and uniqueness of the solution is also checked in a Sobolev space. From the numerical experiments we can observe that the proposed PDE can efficiently improve the quality of the high-resolution (HR) image. Surprisingly, the apparition of blur in the restored image is less compared to the other methods. In addition to visual evaluation, two-based metrics are computed to confirm the improvements offered by the proposed PDE.