Efficient Compression for Sampled Color Images

Single image sensors with color filter arrays have been widely used in color imaging systems. In typical applications, sampled color images obtained using a single sensor are first interpolated and then compressed. In this paper, we propose an efficient compression method for such images. Instead of encoding full color image data obtained by demosaicking, the proposed method divides sampled color images into sub-images. Then, one sub-image is encoded and the other sub-images are estimated from the encoded subimage. Finally, the differences images of the other sub-images are encoded. Since the total size of the sampled color images is smaller than that of the full color images, compression efficiency is improved. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces improved performance compared to existing methods.