Hybrid color filter array demosaicking for effective artifact suppression

Color filter array (CFA) demosaicking is an essential process for restoring full-color images from incomplete color samples acquired by single-sensor digital cameras. We present two main contributions to CFA demosaicking. First, we analyze the causes of two main types of CFA demosaicking artifacts and examine the schemes that are effective in suppressing them, respectively. Second, by combining and extending the core merits of the schemes examined, we compose a new CFA demosaicking algorithm to suppress as many demosaicking artifacts as possible and obtain fullcolor images of high quality. Experiments using a large variety of test images have been conducted, and the results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods both visually and in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio. © 2006 SPIE and IS&T. DOI: 10.1117/1.2183325