Low Cost Edge Sensing for High Quality Demosaicking

Digital cameras that use color filter arrays (CFA) entail a demosaicking procedure to form full RGB images. To digital camera industry, demosaicking speed is as important as demosaicking accuracy, because camera users have been accustomed to viewing captured photos instantly. Moreover, the cost associated with demosaicking should not go beyond the cost saved by using CFA. For this purpose, we revisit the classical Hamilton-Adams (HA) algorithm, which outperforms many sophisticated techniques in both speed and accuracy. Our analysis shows that the HA pipeline is highly efficient to exploit the originally captured data, but its oversimplified inter- and intra-channel smoothness formulation hinder its accuracy. Therefore, we propose a very low cost edge sensing scheme, which guides demosaicking by a logistic functional of the difference between directional variations. We extensively compare our algorithm with 27 demosaicking algorithms by running their open source code on benchmark datasets. Compared with the methods of similar computational cost, our method achieves substantially higher accuracy, whereas compared with the methods of similar accuracy, our method has significantly lower cost. On test images of currently popular resolution, the quality of our algorithm is comparable to top performers, yet our speed is tens of times faster.