Weighted edge-based low-cost artifacts-free high-quality VLSI implementation for demosaicking

Bayer color filter array (CFA) is the most used color filter pattern which is employed in digital cameras to capture images, necessitating a demosaicking process for generating complete RGB images. Furthermore, the cost associated with demosaicking must not exceed the savings realized using a CFA. This paper presents a low-cost hardware architecture that produces good image quality with reduced color artifacts in the reconstructed images. In the proposed method, Green interpolation is developed by computing weighted color differences and weighted edges in the horizontal and vertical directions of 5 \(\times\) $\times$ 7 mask size. Red and Blue channel information is obtained by computing color difference values from already computed Green values and corresponding pixel values from the Bayer image. Further, two extra line buffers are used to store the previously computed intermediate Green values, which eliminates the memory requirement to store those values. Compared with the existing methods, our method produces good-quality reconstructed images without color artifacts. The proposed method utilizes less hardware than the previous methods.