BV-G color-image decomposition with its application to Image Processing of a digital color camera

This paper extends the BV (Bounded Variation) - G variational nonlinear image-decomposition approach, which is considered to be useful for image processing of a digital color camera, to a genuine color-image decomposition approach. For utilizing interchannel color cross-correlations, this paper introduces TV (Total Variation) norms of color differences and TV norms of color sums into the BV-G energy functionals, and then derives a denoising-type decomposition-algorithm with over-complete wavelet transform, through applying the Besov-norm approximation to the variational problem. Our method decomposes a noisy color image without producing undesirable low-frequency colored artifacts in its separated BV-component, and achieves desirable high-quality color-image decomposition, which is robust against colored random noise. Furthermore, this paper applies this color-image decomposition method to an IP (Image-Processing) - pipeline of a digital color camera, and the application enables the IP-pipeline to adjust a quality trade-off between texture sharpness and noise visibility according to user's taste.