Mosaic image compression

Most consumer-level digital cameras use a color filter array to capture color mosaic data followed by demosaicking to obtain full-color images. However, many sophisticated demosaicking algorithms are too complex to implement on-board a camera. To use these algorithms, one must transfer the mosaic data from the camera to a computer without introducing compression losses that could generate artifacts in the demosaicked image. The memory required for losslessly stored mosaic images severely restricts the number of images that can be stored in the camera. Therefore, we need an algorithm to compress the original mosaic data losslessly so that it can later be transferred intact for demosaicking. We propose a new lossless compression technique for mosaic images in this paper. Ordinary image compression methods do not apply to mosaic images because of their non-canonical color sampling structure. Because standard compression methods such as JPEG, JPEG2000, etc. are already available in most digital cameras, we have chosen to build our algorithms using a standard method as a key part of the system. The algorithm begins by separating the mosaic image into 3 color (RGB) components. This is followed by an interpolation or down-sampling operation--depending on the particular variation of the algorithm--that makes all three components the same size. Using the three color components, we form a color image that is coded with JPEG. After appropriately reformatting the data, we calculate the residual between the original image and the coded image and then entropy-code the residual values corresponding to the mosaic data.