Does enlarging images make them easier to analyze programmatically?

Question

Can you enlarge a feature so that rather than take up a certain number of pixels it actually takes up one or two times that many to make it easier to analyze? Would there be a way to generalize that in MATLAB?

Answer 1

The function imresize is useful for, well, resizing images, larger or smaller. And imcrop is useful for cropping images.

You might get other more useful answers if you tag the question image-processing too.

Answer 2

This sounds an awful lot like a fictitious "zoom, enhance!" procedure that you'd hear about on CSI. In general, "blowing up" a feature doesn't make it any easier to analyze, because no additional information is created when you do this. Generally you would apply other, different transformations like noise reduction to make analysis easier.

Answer 3

You might be able to intelligently increase the resolution of an image using Compressed Sensing. It will require some work (or at least some serious thought), though, as you'll have to determine how best to sample the image you already have. There's a large number of papers referenced at Rice University Compressive Sensing Resources.

The challenge is that the image is already sampled using Nyquist-Shannon constraints. You essentially have to re-sample it using a linear basis function (with IID random elements) in such a way that the estimate is at the desired resolution and find some surrogate for the original image at that same resolution that doesn't bias the estimate.

Answer 4

As John F has stated, you are not adding any information. In fact, with more pixels to crunch through you are making it "harder" in the sense of requiring more processing.