Optimal design of mosaic color filters for the improvement of image quality in electronic endoscopes

A new technique to design mosaic color filters on a CCD area sensor is proposed to improve the quality of electronic endoscope image. Images obtained from the CCD sensor have an interpolation error. The error causes degradation of spatial information in the reproduced image. In this paper, we analyzed spatial distribution of the reflectance spectra in the electronic endoscope image, and the distribution was used to optimize the spectral transmittance of the color filters for the improvement of image quality. The simulated annealing technique was utilized for optimization.