Ultra-low-cost colour demosaicking VLSI design for real-time video applications

A novel low-complexity and high-quality colour demosaicking algorithm is proposed for very large-scale integration (VLSI) implementation for real-time video applications. It consists of a boundary detector, a boundary mirror model and five green and red-blue colour interpolation models. Two of the five interpolation models can be selected adaptively according to boundary and position information. In addition, a boundary mirror machine and identical direction technique were used to improve the qualities of the reconstructed images. To reduce the hardware cost, memory requirement and power consumption, a hardware-sharing technique and register bank design were used to realise the proposed algorithm. The VLSI architecture of this work contains only 2.9 K gate counts and its core area is 35 966 μm² synthesised by a 0.18 μm CMOS process. The synthesised results show that this design performs an operating frequency of 100 MHz processing rate by consuming only 1.83 mW. Compared with the previous low-complexity designs, this work not only reduces at least 48.2% of gate counts and 96.7% of power consumption but also improves the average CPSNR quality by more than 0.78 dB.