A contourlet-based interpolation restoration method for super-resolution of SAR image

As is well known that the quality of a digital image is affected by many factors, such as the distance between the acquisition system and the object, the acquisition environment conditions, and the resolution of the image sensors employed, and so on. So how to obtain high quality images has become a difficult task in practical applications. Image super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) is a signal processing approach which can produces a high-resolution (HR) image from observed multiple low-resolution (LR) images. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the potential application of SR techniques to synthetic aperture radar (SAR). In this paper, a LR image is used to extract high frequency information and reconstruct a high resolution image by an interpolation-restoration method based on contourlet transform to solve the problem of SRR. Experimental results show that the method has the superior performance in subjective visual quality.