Increasing the resolution of a grayscale image 16-times the original

Say that you were required to increase the resolution of a `grayscale` image by `16` times. How would that be done in `MATLAB`?

Thanks.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

To increase the number of pixels in the image by 16 in each dimension:

bigImage = imresize(originalImage, 16);

[med-sweng]

@ImageAnalyst. Thanks for your reply. So, does increasing the number of pixels in the image by `16` refer to the same meaning as increasing the resolution of the image by * 16 times * ? When someone says increasing the image 16 times in resolution, you feel it is more than just adding 16-pixels to each dimension. Am I wrong here?

[Image Analyst]

Increasing the number of pixels will not increase the spatial resolution of your image anywhere except in Hollywood. You simply have more pixels, not more resolving power. Computer people talk of resolution in terms of how many pixels it has. Optics people (like me) talk about resolution in terms of how small are the details in the image that you can see. If you have a shot of a person sitting on a cliff a half mile away, then increasing the number of pixels by 16 will make the person larger but can't increase the spatial resolution so all you'll have is a larger but still very blurry picture of the person. You will not suddenly be able to see facial features, etc. if you couldn't in the original image. You can do spatial filtering to increase the resolution if you know the point spread function - it will improve resolution but it's not perfect and there's a limit to how much it can get improved.