We present a learning based method for image super resolution problem. Our approach uses kernel methods to build an efficient representation and also to learn the regression model. For constructing an efficient set of features, we apply Kernel Principal Component Analysis (Kernel-PCA) with a Gaussian kernel on a patch based data-base constructed from 69 training images up-scaled using bi-cubic interpolation. These features were given as input to a non-linear Support Vector Regression (SVR) model, with Gaussian kernel, to predict the pixels of the high resolution image. The model selection for SVR was performed using grid search. We tested our algorithm on an unseen data-set of 13 images. Our method out-performed a state-of the-art method and achieved an average of 0.92 dB higher Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). The average improvement in PSNR over bi-cubic interpolation was found to be 3.38 dB. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.