Color filter arrays: design and performance analysis

This paper describes the design of color filter arrays (CFAs) used in the consumer-grade digital camera, and analyses their influence on the performance of the demosaicking process. Of particular interest are RGB CFAs widely used in a single-sensor imaging pipeline. Different design characteristics of various image-enabled consumer electronic devices by the different manufacturers lead to the several arrangements of the color filters in the CFA, affecting both performance and computational efficiency of the demosaicking solution. Extensive experimentation, using ten RGB CFAs and a universal demosaicking framework, reported in this paper indicates that the CFA has a great impact on both the objective and subjective (visual) quality of the demosaicked, full-color image.