Analysis of the Impact of Demosaicking on JPEG Image Compression

Most consumer digital cameras capture colour data using a single light sensor with a colour filter array (CFA). This results in a mosaic image where each pixel location contains either a red, green or blue sample, and the two missing colours must be interpolated from the surrounding samples in a process called demosaicking. After demosaicking the image is typically compressed with lossy methods. In this paper we examine the impact demosaicking has on subsequent JPEG compression of still images. Simulations indicate the demosaicking method chosen affects the amount of error introduced in the compression stage and that the amount of compression applied affects the benefit from using more advanced demosaicking methods.