Cost-effective color filter array demosaicing using spatial correlation

In this paper, we propose a cost-effective color filter array (CFA) demosaicing method for digital still cameras in which a single CCD or CMOS image sensor is used. Since a CFA is adopted, we must interpolate missing color values in the red, green and blue channels at each pixel location. While most state-of-the-art algorithms invest a great deal of computational effort in the enhancement of the reconstructed image to overcome the color artifacts, we focus on eliminating the color artifacts with low computational complexity. Using spatial correlation of the adjacent pixels, the edge-directional information of the neighbor pixels is used for determining the edge direction of the current pixel. We apply our method to the state-of-the-art algorithms which use edge-directed methods to interpolate the missing color channels. The experiment results show that the proposed method enhances the demosaiced image quality, especially visually, by removing most of the color artifacts.