IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 7, NO.
1, JANUARY 2010
Satellite Image Resolution Enhancement Using
Complex Wavelet Transform
Hasan Demirel and Gholamreza Anbarjafari
Abstract—In this letter, a satellite image resolution enhance-
ment technique based on interpolation of the high-frequency sub-
band images obtained by dual-tree complex wavelet transform
(DT-CWT) is proposed. DT-CWT is used to decompose an input
low-resolution satellite image into different subbands. Then, the
high-frequency subband images and the input image are interpo-
lated, followed by combining all these images to generate a new
high-resolution image by using inverse DT-CWT. The resolution
enhancement is achieved by using directional selectivity provided
by the CWT, where the high-frequency subbands in six different
directions contribute to the sharpness of the high-frequency details
such as edges. The quantitative peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)
and visual results show the superiority of the proposed tech-
nique over the conventional bicubic interpolation, wavelet zero
padding, and Irani and Peleg based image resolution enhancement
techniques.
Index Terms—Dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT),
resolution enhancement, satellite images.
I. I NTRODUCTION
N OWADAYS, satellite images are used in many appli-
cations such as geoscience studies, astronomy, and ge-
ographical information systems. One of the most important
quality factors in images comes from its resolution. Interpo-
lation in image processing is a well-known method to increase
the resolution of a digital image. Interpolation has been widely
used in many image-processing applications such as facial re-
construction [1], multiple-description coding [2], and resolution
enhancement [3], [4].
Many interpolation techniques have been developed to in-
crease the image resolution. There are three well-known in-
terpolation techniques, namely, nearest neighbor interpolation,
bilinear interpolation, and bicubic interpolation. Bicubic inter-
polation is more sophisticated than the other two techniques;
however, it produces noticeably sharper images.
Image-resolution enhancement in the wavelet domain is a
relatively new research topic, and, recently, many new algo-
rithms have been proposed [4], [5]. Complex wavelet trans-
Manuscript received June 5, 2009; revised July 9, 2009 and July 13,
2009. First published September 11, 2009; current version published
January 13, 2010.
H. Demirel is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineer-
ing, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, North Cyprus, Mersin 10,
Turkey (e-mail: hasan.demirel@emu.edu.tr).
G. Anbarjafari is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, North Cyprus,
Mersin 10, Turkey, and also with the Faculty of Engineering, Cyprus In-
ternational University, Nicosia, North Cyprus, Mersin 10, Turkey (e-mail:
shahab.jafari@emu.edu.tr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LGRS.2009.2028440
1545-598X/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE
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123
form (CWT) [6] is one of the recent wavelet transforms used
in image processing. A one-level CWT of an image pro-
duces two complex-valued low-frequency subband images and
six complex-valued high-frequency subband images. The high-
frequency subband images are the result of direction-selective
filters. They show peak magnitude responses in the presence of
image features oriented at +75◦ , +45◦ , +15◦ , −15◦ , −45◦ , and
−75◦ [7].
In this letter, we propose a new technique which generates
sharper and detailed superresolved satellite images. The pro-
posed technique uses dual-tree CWT (DT-CWT) to decompose
a low-resolution image into different subband images. Then
the six complex-valued high-frequency subband images are
interpolated using bicubic interpolation. In parallel, the input
image is also interpolated separately. Finally, the interpolated
high-frequency subband images and interpolated input image
are combined by using inverse DT-CWT (IDT-CWT) to achieve
a high-resolution output image. The proposed technique has
been compared with conventional and state-of-the-art image
resolution enhancement techniques. These techniques are the
following:
1) interpolation techniques, namely, nearest interpolation,
bilinear interpolation, and bicubic interpolation;
2) wavelet zero padding (WZP);
3) single-frame resolution enhancement by Irani and Peleg
[8], where four low-resolution images generated by rota-
tion and translation from the input low-resolution image
are used.
According to the results, the proposed technique outper-
forms the aforementioned state-of-the-art and conventional
techniques for image resolution enhancement.
II. P ROPOSED DT-CWT-BASED S ATELLITE I MAGE
R ESOLUTION E NHANCEMENT
Resolution is an important feature in satellite imaging, which
makes the resolution enhancement of such images to be of
vital importance. As it was mentioned before, there are many
applications of using satellite images, hence, resolution en-
hancement of such images will increase the quality of the
other applications. The main loss of an image after being
superresolved by applying interpolation is on its high-frequency
components (i.e., edges), which is due to the smoothing caused
by interpolation. Hence, in order to increase the quality of the
superresolved image, preserving the edges is essential. In this
letter, DT-CWT has been employed in order to preserve the
 124
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the proposed resolution enhancement algorithm.
high-frequency components of the image. The DT-CWT has
good directional selectivity and has the advantage over discrete
wavelet transform (DWT). It also has limited redundancy [6].
The DT-CWT is approximately shift invariant, unlike the crit-
ically sampled DWT. The redundancy and shift invariance of
the DT-CWT mean that DT-CWT coefficients are inherently
interpolable [7].
In the proposed image resolution enhancement technique,
DT-CWT is used to decompose an input image into different
subband images. Six complex-valued high-frequency subband
images contain the high-frequency components of the input
image. In the proposed technique, the interpolation is applied
to the high-frequency subband images. In the wavelet domain,
the low-resolution image is obtained by lowpass filtering of
the high-resolution image [9]. In other words, low-frequency
subband images are the low resolution of the original image.
Therefore, instead of using low-frequency subband images,
which contain less information than the original input image,
we are using the input image for the interpolation of two
low-frequency subband images. Hence, using the input image
instead of the low-frequency subband images increases the
quality of the superresolved image. Note that the input image
is interpolated with the half of the interpolation factor α used to
interpolate the high-frequency subbands, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
The two upscaled images are generated by interpolating the
low-resolution original input image and the shifted version of
the input image in horizontal and vertical directions. These two
real-valued images are used as the real and imaginary compo-
nents of the interpolated complex LL image, respectively, for
the IDT-CWT operation. By interpolating the input image by
α/2 and the high-frequency subband images by α and then
by applying IDT-CWT, the output image will contain sharper
edges than the interpolated image obtained by interpolation of
the input image directly.
This is due to the fact that the interpolation of the isolated
high-frequency components in the high-frequency subband
images will preserve more high-frequency components after
the interpolation of the respective subbands separately than
interpolating the input image directly.
In summary, the proposed technique interpolates not
only the input image but also the high-frequency subband
images obtained through the DT-CWT process. The final
high-resolution output image is generated by using the IDT-
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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 7, NO. 1, JANUARY 2010
CWT of the interpolated subband images and the input image.
In the proposed technique, the employed interpolation method
is the same for all subband and the input images. The visual
and the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) results, in the next
section, show that the proposed technique with bicubic interpo-
lation outperforms the conventional bicubic interpolation, WZP,
and Irani and Peleg techniques.
III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSIONS
Fig. 2 shows that superresolved images using the
proposed technique in (c) are much sharper than the original
low-resolution images in (a) and the interpolated images in (b).
In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed
method over the conventional and state-of-the-art image res-
olution enhancement techniques, five satellite images with
different features are used for comparison. Tables I and II
compare the PSNR performance of the proposed technique
with the conventional bicubic interpolation, WZP, and Irani
and Peleg [8] techniques with factors of two and four,
respectively.
The visual results of the proposed technique shown in Fig. 2
support the quantitative results in Tables I and II. For example,
in Fig. 2-(1) image, the PSNR of proposed technique is 2.16 and
6.74 dB higher than the PSNR obtained by using the bicubic
interpolation and WZP technique, respectively. Results in both
tables indicate the superiority of the proposed technique over
the conventional and state-of-the-art image resolution enhance-
ment techniques.
IV. C ONCLUSION
This letter proposes a satellite image resolution enhancement
technique based on the interpolation of the high-frequency
subband images obtained by DT-CWT and the input image. The
proposed technique uses DT-CWT to decompose an image into
different subband images, and then the high-frequency subband
images are interpolated. An original image is interpolated with
half of the interpolation factor used for interpolation of the
high-frequency subband images. Afterward, all these images
are combined using IDT-CWT to generate a superresolved
image. The proposed technique has been tested on several
satellite images, where their PSNR and visual results show the
 DEMIREL AND ANBARJAFARI: SATELLITE IMAGE RESOLUTION ENHANCEMENT 125

Fig. 2. (a) Original low-resolution image. (b) Bicubic interpolated image. (c) Superresolved image using the proposed technique.

superiority of the proposed technique over the conventional and to the directional selectivity of the CWT, where the high-
state-of-the-art image resolution enhancement techniques. The frequency subbands in six different directions contribute to the
main reason of the resolution enhancement can be attributed sharpness of the high-frequency details such as edges.

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 126
TABLE I
PSNR (dB) R ESULTS FOR THE P ROPOSED R ESOLUTION E NHANCEMENT
W ITH A FACTOR OF T WO , F ROM 256 × 256 TO 512 × 512, FOR THE
I NPUT I MAGES S HOWN IN F IG . 2(a) C OMPARED W ITH THE
C ONVENTIONAL AND S TATE - OF - THE -A RT I MAGE R ESOLUTION
E NHANCEMENT T ECHNIQUES
TABLE II
PSNR (dB) R ESULTS FOR THE P ROPOSED R ESOLUTION E NHANCEMENT
W ITH A FACTOR OF F OUR , F ROM 128 × 128 TO 512 × 512, FOR THE
I NPUT I MAGES S HOWN IN F IG . 2(a) C OMPARED W ITH THE
C ONVENTIONAL AND S TATE - OF - THE -A RT I MAGE R ESOLUTION
E NHANCEMENT T ECHNIQUES
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Prof. I. Selesnick from
Polytechnic University for providing the DT-CWT codes
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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 7, NO. 1, JANUARY 2010
in MATLAB and the Google Earth and Satellite Imaging
Corporation for providing satellite images for research
purposes.
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