A new generic progressive approach based on spectral difference for single-sensor multispectral imaging system

Abstract

Single-sensor RGB cameras use a color filter array to capture the initial image and demosaicking technique to reproduce a full-color image. A similar concept can be extended from the color filter array (CFA) to a multispectral filter array (MSFA). It allows us to capture a multispectral image using a single-sensor at a low cost using MSFA demosaicking. The binary tree based MSFAs can be designed for any k-band multispectral images and are preferred, however the existing demosaicking methods are either not generic or are of limited efficacy. In this paper, we propose a new generic demosaicking method applicable on any k-band MSFAs, designed using preferred binary-tree based approach. The proposed method involves applying the bilinear interpolation and estimating the spectral correlation differences appropriately and progressively. Experimental results on two different multispectral image datasets consistently show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-art methods, both visually and quantitatively, as per the different metrics.