A motion-augmented super-resolution scheme for very low-bit-rate video enhancement

High compression ratios introduce visible compression artifacts and blurring. To enhance the quality of the compressed video, a super-resolution (SR) scheme is employed. However, the effectiveness of the SR process depends heavily on the amount of subpixel motion that exists between frames in a video sequence, and on the accuracy of the motion vectors (MV). To increase the effectiveness of the SR process, we introduce the concept of added motion prior to video compression. The parameters of this added motion are sent to the receiver with the compressed bit-stream. The proposed SR scheme also exploits existing motion between frames, by estimating MV for each pixel using the original (uncompressed) video. However, since transmitting the pixel-based MV is not practical due to the resulting significant increase in side information, the proposed scheme selects and sends only a very small set of MV based upon their significance in the super-resolution enhancement. The results obtained show a significant improvement in the visual quality of the video sequences, as well as improvement in PSNR.