Super-resolution challenge, Help requested by the science team Options

[john_s]

Greetings:

Here's another chance to maybe help out the New Horizons science team! We are planning the Pluto imaging sequence, and are considering the best strategy for squeezing the maximum resolution out of our images, including "super resolution" techniques, particularly for the side of Pluto that faces away from us at close approach, which we will see with a disk diameter of only about 120 pixels in our high-resolution camera LORRI. As some members of this forum have done impressive work with super-resolution processing of MER images, maybe you can try your hand with some synthetic "Pluto" images to see what the potential is? This may be more challenging than for MER, because our PSF is relatively broad, about 2 pixels wide.

We want to know how many images to take of a given face of Pluto to get maximum benefit from super resolution techniques, if indeed they are useful at all.

I plan to generate a bunch of synthetic images with slightly different pixel positioning and smear, and with realistic noise levels, and then make them available for experiments to see how well they can be combined and sharpened to improve the resolution.

If you are interested in giving this a shot, let me know. Also let me know if you can work with 12-bit or 16-bit images, and if so what format is most convenient. I can easily make 16-bit FITS files, for instance. It may be that 8-bit PNGs will be adequate, too.

Thanks,
John.

[siravan]

Here is the effect of subpixel shift-and-add on the dataset. The image on the right is the first raw image, enlarged twice and unsharped. To make the one on the left, all the raw images are scaled x8, then the amount of shift for each one compared to the first image (in the x8 setting, i.e. 0.125 pixels resolution in the original dataset) is found and they are co-added taking into account the shift value, and finally the co-added image is rescaled to x2 and processed using the same unsharp filter as the one applied to the image on the right.

The main difference in that unsharping introduced lots of noise to the raw image, whereas the processed image tolerated it much better and some previously unseen features are now detectable.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[john_s]

Thanks to both ugordan and siravan for those images! We're also interested in what can be done with a smaller number of images, 4, for example. Could you try the same thing using just four of the input images?

Thanks,
John.