New color filter arrays of high light sensitivity and high demosaicking performance

For high light sensitivity, new CFA designs use panchromatic pixels, aka white pixels, that no visible spectrum energy is filtered. Kodak's CFA2.0 has 50% white pixels, but the demosaicking performance is not good. We present in this work a set of new color filter arrays (CFA) of high light sensitivity and high demosaicking performance which were obtained by using a CFA design methodology in the frequency domain. The new patterns are of size 5×5 and come from the same frequency structure, which has one luma in the base band at (0, 0) and four chromas (two conjugate pairs) placed at (4π/5, 2π/5), (- 4π/5, - 2π/5), (2π/5, - 4π/5) and (- 2π/5, 4π/5), respectively. The new patterns are optimized to have only white (panchromatic) and three primary color pixels and the pixels are found to be 40% white, 20% red, 20% green and 20% blue by pixel color constrained optimization. Our demosaicking experiments show that our new CFA patterns outperform Kodak CFA2.0 in both objective and subjective quality.