Optimal color filter array design: quantitative conditions and an efficient search procedure

Most digital cameras employ a spatial subsampling process, implemented as a color filter array (CFA), to capture color images. The choice of CFA patterns has a great impact on the performance of subsequent reconstruction (demosaicking) algorithms. In this work, we propose a quantitative theory for optimal CFA design. We view the CFA sampling process as an encoding (low-dimensional approximation) operation and, correspondingly, demosaicking as the best decoding (reconstruction) operation. Finding the optimal CFA is thus equivalent to finding the optimal approximation scheme for the original signals with minimum information loss. We present several quantitative conditions for optimal CFA design, and propose an efficient computational procedure to search for the best CFAs that satisfy these conditions. Numerical experiments show that the optimal CFA patterns designed from the proposed procedure can effectively retain the information of the original full-color images. In particular, with the designed CFA patterns, high quality demosaicking can be achieved by using simple and efficient linear filtering operations in the polyphase domain. The visual qualities of the reconstructed images are competitive to those obtained by the state-of-the-art adaptive demosaicking algorithms based on the Bayer pattern.