Exploitation of inter-color correlation for color image demosaicking

Image demosaicking or color filter array interpolation is a process of interpolating missing color samples to reconstruct a full color image. In general, existing algorithms assume that the high frequency components such as edges, texture etc. of different color channels are similar and thus take an advantage of it to estimate the missing samples. In this paper, we efficiently analyze the relationships of intra and inter-color correlation among the channels and observe that such assumption fails in most cases. In view of this observation, we propose a scheme that exploits the correlation between different color channels much effectively than the existing algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing methods both in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and visual perception.