Super resolution from many small images
Alec Jacobson
July 13, 2011
Searching for large, high resolution images of famous artwork I'm often frustrated. There are so many small, low resolution images. Many are different resizes of the same image, but there are still many totally different images of the same thing: photographs various tourists have taken, scans from different galleries or museums. What I always end up wishing for is a way to combine all of these low resolution images into one super-resolution image. In this specific case of famous artwork, the problem should be rather simplified from the general problem of super-resolution. The images are of the exact same object. And the object more or less doesn't change over time. There are lighting differences, but we can assume that since the work is famous there will be enough "correct" images to uncover the true colors. The images will be different scales, and perhaps taken from slightly different camera orientations or projections. But since artwork is mostly photographed head on with little to no perspective projection, I think these will be easy to cope with.
My working example will be to uncover a super-resolution version of Matisse's "Nude in a white dress". If you'd also like to try, here's a zipped folder of bunch of low-res images of the painting I've grabbed from the web. But it's easy to make your own dataset. Just search for images of your favorite famous painting.