Wavelet-domain demosaicking using linear estimation of interchannel correlation

The light information obtained through a color filter array is sampled as R (red), G (green), and B (blue) based on the intensity of the radiation sensor CCD charge-coupled device (CCD) or complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS). Because one pixel in the CCD or CMOS has a wave value for only one color, the information on the other two colors has to be estimated from the samples of the neighboring pixels. This estimation process is called demosaicking, and it plays an important role in the image pipeline. We propose a demosaicking method that uses the correlation among the wavelet coefficients in the high-frequency region of the color channels (R, G, and B). In our method, the high-frequency wavelet coefficients are obtained by linear estimation. The low-frequency coefficients are replaced by the results obtained from bilinear interpolation. We simulate our method and compare it with existing demosaicking schemes. The experimental results show that the proposed method can perform good demosaicking. (C) 2008 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.