Single image super-resolution by non-linear sparse representation and support vector regression

Sparse representations are widely used tools in image super-resolution (SR) tasks. In the sparsity-based SR methods, linear sparse representations are often used for image description. However, the non-linear data distributions in images might not be well represented by linear sparse models. Moreover, many sparsity-based SR methods require the image patch self-similarity assumption; however, the assumption may not always hold. In this paper, we propose a novel method for single image super-resolution (SISR). Unlike most prior sparsity-based SR methods, the proposed method uses non-linear sparse representation to enhance the description of the non-linear information in images, and the proposed framework does not need to assume the self-similarity of image patches. Based on the minimum reconstruction errors, support vector regression (SVR) is applied for predicting the SR image. The proposed method was evaluated on various benchmark images, and promising results were obtained.