Face hallucination via re-identified K-nearest neighbors embedding

Based on locally linear embedding (LLE) manifold learning theory, which assumes that the low-resolution (LR) manifold and high-resolution (HR) manifold spaces share the same local geometry structure, neighbor embedding based super-resolution(SR) methods search K-nearest neighbors(K-NN) of LR patch, then use the counterpart HR patches to estimate HR patch. The primary issue of these methods is how to search the optimal K-NN. However, due to the 'one-to-many' mapping between the LR image and HR ones in practice, the neighborhood relationship of the LR patch in LR space is very different with its HR counterpart's. In this paper, we explore a novel and effective re-identified K-NN(RIKNN) method to search neighbors of LR patch by taking into consideration the neighbor information in the HR space. It searches K-NN of LR patch in the LR space and then refines the searching results by re-identifying in the HR space, thus giving rise to accurate K-NN and improvement performance. Experimental results with application to face hallucination demonstrate that our method outperforms state of the art in terms of subjective and objective results and computational complexity.