of projections onto convex sets pocs as the image is sharpened the ringing artifacts are made more pronounced this arises because the whole concept of these sr operations is directed at extracting the missing high frequency components from other low resolution pictures and updating the sr picture with these high frequency components however these high frequency components are estimated and thus include errors hence each iteration is trying to correct previous errors with another set of high frequency components which contain additional errors thus ringing artifacts are generated in order to avoid the generation of ringing artifacts or to suppress them the present invention retains the sr reference picture without updating it during each iteration of the frame loop thereby avoiding error propagation the present invention thus smoothes out high frequency components toward reducing ringing and noise by averaging the extracted high frequency information over a number of frames images in one mode of the invention the degree of averaging is determined in response to the number n of high frequency components being averaged therein selectively controlling the extent to which ringing and noise are reduced it should be appreciated that the value selected for n determines the tradeoff between sharpness and ringing for this inventive approach it should be appreciated that for the sake of simplicity a straight forward weighted average is described herein although the present invention may utilize various forms of averaging controlled in various ways without departing from the teachings of the present invention for example an averaging technique may be performed in response to system parameters and characteristics of.