Towards optimal color image coding using demosaicing

We introduce an optimal approach to color image compression using demosaicing. Accordingly, we propose an efficient algorithm for color image coding. In the encoder, a mosaic of the primary colors is encoded instead of the full color image. This mosaic is considered as four different color channels that are compressed using subband transform coders. In the decoder, a demosaicing algorithm is applied to the decompressed channels to reconstruct the full image. We use optimized color transforms both in the encoding stage and in the decoding stage. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms currently available techniques with regard to visual and quantitative measures and is efficient for color image coding.