Conception of a high-speed digital color imaging device

Abstract

High-speed color digital imaging devices are desired for many applications, including civilian and military missions. To capture color images a color sensor has to divide the incidence light into three spectral bands: blue, green and red. Due to the limitation of the spectral bandwidth, the speed of a color digital sensor is significant slower than that of a black and white sensor covering the entire visible bandwidth or the entire bandwidth from visible to near infrared. This paper introduces the conception of a high-speed color imaging device which can significantly increase the imaging speed without losing image resolution and other image qualities. This device uses the concept of black and white imaging to increase the imaging speed while keeping the image resolution unchanged. It also uses the concept of color imaging to capture color information, but at a significantly lower resolution to allow more incidence light being received by each sensor detector (pixel) to increase the imaging speed. The final color image at the desired resolution is recovered by integrating the spatial information from the black and white image and the color information from the low-resolution color image. An automatic image fusion technique is used to integrate the spatial information and the color information. The quality of the image fusion technique plays a crucial role for quality of the recovered color image. The concept of this high-speed color imaging device has been tested with available low-resolution color images and high-resolution black and white images from the latest commercial satellites, Ikonos and QuickBird. The test results demonstrated that the concept of the high-speed digital color imaging device is promising for producing real high-speed color digital devices for practical applications.