Edge-preserving Demosaicing Method for Digital Cameras with Bayer-like W-RGB Color Filter Array

A demosaicing method for a Bayer-like W-RGB color filter array (CFA) is proposed. When reproducing images from a W-RGB CFA, conventional color separation methods for W-RGB CFA are likely to cause blurring near the edges due to rough averaging using a color ratio of neighboring pixels. Moreover, these methods cannot be applied to real-life digital cameras with W-RGB CFA because the methods were proposed under an ideal situation, W=R+G+B, not a real-life situation, W≠R+G+B. To improve edge performance, we propose a method of constant color difference assumption with inversed weight, which uses information from all edge directions for interpolating all missing color channels. The proposed method calculates the correlation between W, R, G, and B to enable its application to real-life digital cameras with W-RGB CFA. Simulations were performed to evaluate the proposed method using images captured from a real-life digital camera with W-RGB CFA. Simulation results shows that we can demosaic by using the proposed algorithm compared with the conventional one in about +34.79% SNR, +11.43% PSNR, +1.54% SSIM and 14.02% S-CIELAB error. Thus, the proposed method demosaics better than the conventional methods.