Exploring super-resolution implementations across multiple platforms

The performance of many applications, such as video streaming, webcam conferencing, and aerial surveillance, all greatly depend on video quality. A major issue with higher quality video is that either more data bandwidth or storage resources must be dedicated for transferring or storing the video. However, if the low-resolution video is transferred or stored in order to conserve data bandwidth and storage space, super-resolution is a viable solution that can be applied afterwards on the receiving end to rectify the poor quality of the low-resolution video. Super-resolution is an imaging technique that leverages motion blur and multiple low-resolution frames to construct a high-resolution frame. In our paper, we implement and analyze a super-resolution algorithm across multiple platforms ranging from purely hardware to purely software and even a mix of both hardware and software. More specifically, we examine the performance for a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation on two different FPGAs, a software/hardware solution on a FPGA with a soft core processor, a general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) implementation, and a MATLAB implementation. Overall, we found that the GPGPU provides the best overall performance with up to 29 FPS with 35 iterations of the super-resolution algorithm. A high-performance FPGA can have comparable performance and rival the GPGPU in some cases. One of the interesting results was that the hardware/software FPGA combination performed worse than the pure software implementation.