Superresolution reconstruction of a video captured by a translational vibrated staggered TDI camera

Time-delay and integration (TDI) scanning imaging technique is used in various applications such as military reconnaissance and industrial product inspection. Its high sensitivity is significant in low light-level imaging and in thermal imaging. Due to physical constraints the TDI sensor elements may have a staggered structure, in which the odd and the even sensors are horizontally separated. The electrical cooling system of the detectors, as well as the camera platform, vibrates the system and causes image distortions such as space variant comb effects and motion blur. These vibrations are utilized here in means of superresolution in order to create an improved high resolution sequence from lower resolution sequence in two main stages: inter-frame space-variant motion estimation followed by an efficient implementation of the projection onto convex sets (POCS) restoration method. This work generalizes an algorithm for restoration of a single staggered TDI image preformed previously. The additional information included in an image sequence allows more efficient restoration process, and better restoration results. The lack of any assumption about the correlation between the vibrations of the odd and even sensors enables also an implementation to TDI cameras that don't contain the staggering structure. Experimental results with real degraded thermal video are provided.