Color Demosaicing of RGBW Color Filter Array Based on Laplacian Pyramid

In recent years, red, green, blue, and white (RGBW) color filter arrays (CFAs) have been developed to solve the problem of low-light conditions. In this paper, we propose a new color demosaicing algorithm for RGBW CFAs using a Laplacian pyramid. Because the white channel has a high correlation to the red, green, and blue channels, the white channel is interpolated first using each color difference channel. After we estimate the white channel, the red, green, and blue channels are interpolated using the Laplacian pyramid decomposition of the estimated white channel. Our proposed method using Laplacian pyramid restoration works with Canon-RGBW CFAs and any other periodic CFAs. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method shows superior performance compared with other conventional methods in terms of the color peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index measure, and average execution time.

Automated summary

In this paper, we propose a new color demosaicing algorithm using a Laplacian pyramid for RGBW CFAs. The algorithm estimates the red, green, and blue channels by interpolating the white channel, and demonstrates superior performance in the experiments.