Emulate Large Sensor Array of Handheld Digital Camera

The digital cameras can be easily integrated with other handheld devices in one single chip. For hardware size and cost consideration, the camera sensor array of the PDAs or the cellular phones is therefore limited. However, as the demand for better image quality is increasing, the producer needs to employ large sensor array for higher image resolutions. Therefore, how to emulate large sensor array to raise resolutions is a key problem to these devices. In this paper, a novel enlargement method on Bayer pattern has been presented. We introduce a unified image processing scheme which effectively interpolates the sensor array directly for a higher resolution. The unified image processing scheme can also lead to efficient hardware implementations. Unlike traditional enlargement methods which operate only within a color plane, our method utilizes the relationship between the distinct channel color differences of neighbors and the non-cross weighting-based approach. Experimental results indicate the proposed method has the ability to emulate efficiently larger sensor array from the relation of color difference over local region and edge-sensing weight coefficients. The proposed algorithm gives sharp edges over the enlarged image without color-bleeding artifacts. Both subjective visual evaluation and objective performance measurement demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method