Adaptive demosaicking

Digital still color cameras sample the visible spectrum using an array of color filters overlaid on a CCD, such that each pixel samples only one color band. The resulting mosaic of color samples is processed to produce a high-resolution color image, such that a value of a color band not sampled at a certain location is estimated from its neighbors. This is often referred to as ‘‘demosaicking.’’ The human retina has a similar structure, although the distribution of cones is not as regular. Motivated by the human visual system, we propose an adaptive demosaicking technique in the framework of bilateral filtering. This approach provides us with a means to denoise, sharpen, and demosaic the image simultaneously. The proposed method, along with a variety of existing demosaicking strategies, are run on synthetic images and real-world images for comparative purposes. A recently proposed image comparison measure geared specifically toward demosaicking has also been applied to these images to provide a performance measure. © 2003 SPIE and IS&T. [DOI: 10.1117/1.1606459]