Cost Effective Color Filter Array Demosaicking with Chrominance Variance Weighted Interpolation

Demosaicking is a color interpolation process that converts a raw image generated by a color filter array to a full color image. For most of the proposed demosaicking methods, the design only focus on image quality without considering the VLSI hardware cost. In this paper, the hardware cost required for many demosaicking algorithms is first analyzed. According to this analysis, a cost effective method is proposed by use of chrominance variance weighting scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better image quality in PSNR than the existing methods on variety of test images while low hardware cost is still maintained. It shows that this method can be a good compromise between image quality and hardware cost.