Hallucinating face by position-patch

A novel face hallucination method is proposed in this paper for the reconstruction of a high-resolution face image from a low-resolution observation based on a set of highand low-resolution training image pairs. Different from most of the established methods based on probabilistic or manifold learning models, the proposed method hallucinates the high-resolution image patch using the same position image patches of each training image. The optimal weights of the training image position-patches are estimated and the hallucinated patches are reconstructed using the same weights. The final highresolution facial image is formed by integrating the hallucinated patches. The necessity of two-step framework or residue compensation and the differences between hallucination based on patch and global image are discussed. Experiments show that the proposed method without residue compensation generates higher-quality images and costs less computational time than some recent face image super-resolution (hallucination) techniques. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.