Low-complexity color demosaicing algorithm based on integrated gradients

Color demosaicing is critical for digital cameras, because it converts a Bayer sensor mosaic output to a full color image, which determines the output image quality of the camera. In this work, an efficient decision-based demosaicing method is presented. This method exploits a new edge-sensing measure called integrated gradient (IG) to effectively extract gradient information in both color intensity and color difference domains simultaneously. This measure is reliable and supports full resolution, which allows one to interpolate the missing samples along an appropriate direction and hence directly improves the demosaicing performance. By sharing it in different demosaicing stages to guide the interpolation of various color planes, it guarantees the consistency of the interpolation direction in different color channels and saves the effort required to repeatedly extract gradient information from intermediate interpolation results at different stages. An IG-based green plane enhancement is also proposed to further improve the method's efficiency. Simulation results confirm that the proposed demosaicing method outperforms up-to-date demosaicing methods in terms of output quality at a complexity of around 80 arithmetic operations per pixel. (C) 2010 SPIE and IS&T. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3432484]