An efficient color image acquisition system for wireless handheld devices

The paper presents a low-cost, low-power, and yet highly effective, color image acquisition system for wireless handheld devices such as cellular camera phones and PDAs. In common color image acquisition systems, Bayer pattern image data are captured from a CMOS/CCD color image sensor and processed to generate a YCbCr color signal for the image compression engine. The proposed system uses a novel vertex-centered color interpolation algorithm for parallel interpolation of groups of pixels within a window and directly processes the image from the Bayer pattern data to the YCbCr color space. The proposed system also uses pseudo-median filtering on the Cb and Cr color channels to enhance image quality with low hardware complexity.