Morphological image enlargements

This paper presents a method based in mathematical morphology to enlarge images. It does not make the low pass assumption which is common to all linear interpolation methods and which does not often hold for images. Pixels in smooth areas are properly interpolated by linear methods while those at the edges are not. The method begins with a linear interpolation and a gradient computation. The gradient serves as a measure of confidence about the linear interpolation. Then, the proposed algorithm processes the pixels in a certain order: first pixels with high confidence (smooth zones) of the image and those with a low one (edges) at the end. By doing so, it preserves both slow variations and sharp edges. The method can be applied to other image processing problems, such as edge enhancement or motion vector estimation, where there is an image and confidence information about each pixel. (C) 1997 Academic Press.