Temporal color video demosaicking via motion estimation and data fusion

Color demosaicking of charge-coupled device (CCD) data has been thoroughly studied for single-sensor still digital cameras. However, there has seemingly been little research on color demosaicking techniques for single-sensor video digital cameras. The temporal dimension of a color mosaic image sequence can reveal new information on the missing color components due to the mosaic subsampling, which is otherwise unavailable in the spatial domain of individual frames. This paper proposes a temporal approach to color demosaicking. A pixel of the current frame is matched to another in a reference frame via motion analysis, such that the CCD sensor samples different color components of the same object position in the two frames. The resulting inter-frame estimates of missing color components are fused with suitable intra-frame estimates to achieve a more robust color restoration. Our experimental results demonstrate clear advantages of the presented temporal color demosaicking approach over its intra-frame counterparts in reducing the color artifacts.