Edge Adaptive Color Interpolation for Ultra-Small HD-Grade CMOS Video Sensor in Camera Phones

Abstract

This paper proposes an edge adaptive color interpolation for an ultra-small HD-grade complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) video sensor in camera phones that can process 720-p/30-fps videos. Recently, proposed methods with great image quality perceptually reconstruct the green component and then estimate the red/blue component using the reconstructed green and neighbor red and blue pixels. However, these methods require the bulky memory line buffers in order to temporally store the reconstructed green components. The edge adaptive color interpolation method uses seven or nine patterns to calculate the six edge directions. At the same time, the threshold values are adaptively adjusted by the sum of the color values of the selected pixels. This method selects the suitable one among the patterns using two flowcharts proposed in this paper, and then interpolates the missing color values. For verification, we calculated the peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) in the test images, which were processed by the proposed algorithm, and compared the calculated PSNR of the existing methods. The proposed color interpolation is also fabricated with the 0.18-<TEX>${\mu}m$</TEX> CMOS flash memory process.