Super-resolution still and video reconstruction from MPEG-coded video

There are a number of useful methods for creating high-quality video or still images from a lower quality video source. The best of these involve motion compensating a number of video frames to produce the desired video or still. These methods are formulated in the space domain and they require that the input be expressed in that format. More and more frequently, however, video sources are presented in a compressed format, such as MPEG, H.263, or DV. Ironically, there is important information in the compressed domain representation that is lost if the video is first decompressed and then used with a spatial-domain method. In particular, quantization information is lost once the video has been decompressed. Here, we propose a motion-compensated, transform-domain super-resolution procedure for creating high-quality video or still images that directly incorporates the transform-domain quantization information by working with the compressed bit stream. We apply this new formulation to MPEG-compressed video and demonstrate its effectiveness.