Multispectral demosaicking using guided filter

Abstract

Multispectral imaging is highly demanded for precise color reproduction and for various computer vision applications. Multispectral imaging with a multispectral color filter array (MCFA), which can be considered as a multispectral extension of commonly used consumer RGB cameras, could be a simple, low-cost, and practical system. A challenge of the multispectral imaging with the MCFA is multispectral demosaicking because each spectral component of the MCFA is severely undersampled. In this paper, we propose a novel multispectral demosaicking algorithm using a guided filter. The guided filter is recently proposed as an excellent structurepreserving filter. The guided filter requires so-called a guide image. A main issue of the guided filter is how to obtain an effective guide image. In our proposed algorithm, we generate the guide image from the most densely sampled spectral component in the MCFA. Then, ohter spectral components are interpolated by the guided filter. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms other existing demosaicking algorithms both visually and quantitatively.