Quote Originally Posted by Nodda Duma View Post
If you consider the "downsampling operator" is analogous to the optical point spread function and the Nyquist frequency for the imaging system, then you'll understand why this technique and others like it are not only theoretically possible, but practically possible as well.

This isn't the only approach nor are they working in a vacuum. Super-resolution techniques have been actively employed for over a decade, seeing first widespread use in smart phone cameras.

So yeah, it is a reality. Their research, like almost all research, is a small slice of ongoing incremental advancement in a field which the public conscious is only dimly aware of. So I have to chuckle at naysaying that sounds akin to explaining why this internet thing will never take off.

If you think this is amazing technology, look at actual hot optical engineering research topics such as computational optics or plastic GRIN lens printing, graphene detector research, or laminated infrared optics.
Is anyone saying that the technique is not possible, or an isolated effort? I think the naysaying is about how well it works, not that it does not exist. In context to the specific work, down-sampling is not very relevant to the objectives. What they are really after is an accurate up-sampling, or more aptly, interpolation of estimated, missing information. In a practical application, one would start with an image with deficient resolution and try to fill in more pixels with some information from neighboring pixels. I read the paper, and down-sampling and Nyquist frequency hardly gets at what they are doing. My take-away is that their main contribution was getting away from a pixel-wise mean-squared error approach that is commonly used but does not yield very accurate results. Their method is quite impressive, but still, I wonder if it would be good enough in say a court of law where someone's life depended on a truthful image reconstruction.

The research is a reality, but the image reconstructions do not match reality, although they come close sometimes.