Rethinking color cameras

Digital color cameras make sub-sampled measurements of color at alternating pixel locations, and then “demosaick” these measurements to create full color images by up-sampling. This allows traditional cameras with restricted processing hardware to produce color images from a single shot, but it requ...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chakrabarti, Ayan, Freeman, William T., Zickler, Todd
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100404
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2231-7995
Description
Summary:Digital color cameras make sub-sampled measurements of color at alternating pixel locations, and then “demosaick” these measurements to create full color images by up-sampling. This allows traditional cameras with restricted processing hardware to produce color images from a single shot, but it requires blocking a majority of the incident light and is prone to aliasing artifacts. In this paper, we introduce a computational approach to color photography, where the sampling pattern and reconstruction process are co-designed to enhance sharpness and photographic speed. The pattern is made predominantly panchromatic, thus avoiding excessive loss of light and aliasing of high spatial-frequency intensity variations. Color is sampled at a very sparse set of locations and then propagated throughout the image with guidance from the un-aliased luminance channel. Experimental results show that this approach often leads to significant reductions in noise and aliasing artifacts, especially in low-light conditions.