Bayer and panchromatic color filter array demosaicing by sparse recovery

The utility of Compressed Sensing (CS) for demosaicing of digital images have been explored by few recent efforts [1][2][3]. Most recently, a Compressive Demosaicing [3] framework, based on employing a random panchromatic Color Filter Array (CFA) at the sensing stage, has provided compelling CS-based demosaicing results by visually outperforming other leading techniques. Meanwhile, it is well known that the Bayer pattern is arguably the most popular CFA used in low-cost consumer digital cameras. In this paper, we explore and compare the Bayer and random panchromatic CFA structures using a generic approach for demosaicing of images based on recent advances in the field of CS. In particular, a key objective of this work is to provide a comparative analysis between these two CFA patterns (Bayer and random panchromatic) under the general umbrella of sparse recovery, which represents the cornerstone of CS-based decoding. We demonstrate the viability of the Bayer pattern under certain CS conditions. Meanwhile, we show that a random panchromatic CFA, which meets certain incoherence constraints, can visually outperform a Bayer based sparse recovery. As illustrated in our simulation results, a panchromatic CFA is more consistent in terms of providing better visual quality when tested on a wide range of color images.