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.

[john_s]

This is a synthetic image using a Galileo photomosaic, but generated with the same geometry as the best New Horizons Ganymede image (for reasons that seemed like a good idea at the time).

Very interesting Triton image- that plume looks fairly convincing! It's a good analog for what we might see on approach to Pluto, where the approach phase angle (15 degrees) is similar.

John.

[tedstryk]

This is a synthetic image using a Galileo photomosaic, but generated with the same geometry as the best New Horizons Ganymede image (for reasons that seemed like a good idea at the time).

I figured out what the issue is. Most stacks I have worked with include some severely underexposed images. However, the well exposed images were more likely to be smeared because of the longer exposure time. Hence, the high contrast features (the ones visible in even the underexposed but very sharp images) ended up looking better than the fainter features. Given the nature of LORRI (not having color filters), the image sets it produces will likely be more like the Ganymede sample than what I am used to.