Continuous digital zooming of asymmetric dual camera images using registration and variational image restoration

This paper presents a theoretical basis to realize a high-quality digital zooming using two camera modules with different focal lengths. First, we describe an image degradation model of the asymmetric dual camera system to analyze the characteristic of the wide- and tele-view images. In an asymmetric dual camera system, we assume that the shorter focal length module produces the wide-view image with the low-resolution. On the other hand, the longer focal length module produces the tele-view image by an optical zooming. To reconstruct a wide-view image of a continuous digital zooming, the proposed method first estimates the point spread function (PSF) between the wide- and tele-view images. Next, the proposed method performs variational-based image restoration using the estimated PSF. In addition, since the tele-view image inserted into appropriate region of the wide-view image, the proposed method can provide significantly improved wide-view image.