Patent ID: 7679620

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for generating high-resolution bitmaps from low-resolution bitmaps, comprising using a computer to perform the process actions of: magnifying an image to form a magnified image; processing the non-magnified image using all of exact source image pixels, bilinearly blended source image pixels and linearly blended source image pixels of the non-magnified image to obtain a high-resolution, magnified minimum or maximum spatially continuous luminance only function of a local image neighborhood; wherein the process action of processing the non-magnified image to obtain a high resolution, magnified minimum or maximum spatially continuous luminance only function of the local image neighborhood comprises: identifying one or more exact source image pixels, wherein the source image pixels are selected in a given local image neighborhood; bilinearly interpolating one or more source image samples wherein bilinear interpolation weights of the bilinearly interpolated source image samples are coupled to the position of a target pixel relative to the source pixels, and wherein the one or more source image pixels saltate with respect to each target pixel when moving across the non-magnified image; and linearly interpolating one or more source image samples, wherein linear interpolation weights are coupled to the position of the target pixel relative to the source pixels, and wherein the one or more source image pixels saltate with respect to each target pixel when moving across the non-magnified image to find the spatially continuous luminance only minimum or maximum function of the local image neighborhood; performing contrast enhancement on each image pixel of each local image neighborhood of the magnified image based on the local minimum or maximum spatially continuous luminance only function; and producing a high-resolution image from the contrast-enhanced pixels.