Designing color filter arrays for the joint capture of visible and near-infrared images

Digital camera sensors are inherently sensitive to the near-infrared (NIR) part of the light spectrum. In this paper, we propose a general design for color filter arrays that allow the joint capture of visible/NIR images using a single sensor. We pose the CFA design as a novel spatial domain optimization problem, and provide an efficient iterative procedure that finds (locally) optimal solutions. Numerical experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed CFA design, which can simultaneously capture high quality visible and NIR image pairs.