Techniques and systems for developing high-resolution imagery

1. A method for synthesizing a high resolution image comprising:

receiving a sequence pair of images comprising a first image of a low resolution taken from a first camera and a second image of a high resolution taken from a second camera;

receiving a plurality of images temporally adjacent to the second image, the plurality of images being of a high resolution and taken from the second camera;

computing stereo correspondence maps between the first image and the second image;

computing temporal correspondence maps between the first image and each of the plurality of images; and

computing a composite high resolution version of the first image using the stereo correspondence maps and the temporal correspondence maps.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the first image comprises a coordinate system, the method further comprising:

warping the second image to the coordinate system;

computing stereo alignment maps between the warped second image and the first image;

warping the plurality of images to the coordinate system;

computing motion alignment maps between of the warped plurality of images and the first image;

producing a composite correlation map by combining the stereo alignment maps and the motion alignment maps; and

projecting the composite correlation map to the high resolution of the second image.

3. The method of claim 2 , wherein the composite high resolution version of the first image comprises mis-aligned regions, the method further comprising:

filling the mis-aligned regions based on the composite correlation map.

4. The method of claim 3 , further comprising filling the mis-aligned regions with a color-corrected, enhanced, up-sampled first image.

5. The method of claim 4 , further comprising color-correcting the first image using a local adaptive color correction technique.

6. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

computing a new correlation mask for each composite image by imposing temporal consistency; and

filling composite images using the new correlation masks.

7. A method for synthesizing a high resolution image comprising:

receiving a sequence pair comprising a first image of a low resolution taken from a first camera and a second image of a high resolution taken from a second camera;

receiving a third image and a fourth image temporally adjacent to the second image, the third and fourth image being of a high resolution and taken from the second camera;

up-sampling the first image to full resolution;

applying image enhancement to the up-sampled image;

computing a planar parametric motion estimation for a specified planar region in the images to determine a planar alignment between the first image and the second image;

using the planar alignment in computing a correspondence map between the first image and the second image using plane-plus-parallax alignment at the low resolution of the first image;

establishing a correspondence between the first image, the second image, the third image and the fourth image that is displaced in rime by using optical flow;

generating warped images from the second image, the third image and the fourth image using the correspondence map;

computing stereo alignment maps between the warped images and the first image for color channels at a pyramid level 2;

computing motion alignment maps between the third and fourth image and the first image for the color channels at pyramid level 2;

combining all maps to produce a composite correlation map for each of the color channels at pyramid level 2;

projecting the composite correlation map to pyramid level 0;

combining all warped images to create a final composite image at pyramid level 2 and pyramid level 0;

computing a correlation mask between the composite image and the first image at pyramid level 2 and project the mask to pyramid level 0; and

fill in mis-aligned regions in the composite image with the color corrected, enhanced, and up-sampled first image.