Denoising and interpolation of noisy Bayer data with adaptive cross-color filters

We propose a novel approach for joint denoising and interpolation of noisy Bayer-patterned data acquired from a digital imaging sensor (e.g., CMOS, CCD). The aim is to obtain a full-resolution RGB noiseless image. The proposed technique is specifically targeted to filter signal-dependant, e.g. Poissonian, or heteroscedastic noise, and effectively exploits the correlation between the different color channels. The joint technique for denoising and interpolation is based on the concept of local polynomial approximation (LPA) and intersection of confidence intervals (ICI). These directional filters utilize simultaneously the green, red, and blue color channels. This is achieved by a linear combination of complementary-supported smoothing and derivative kernels designed for the Bayer data grid. With these filters, the denoised and the interpolated estimates are obtained by convolutions over the Bayer data. The ICI rule is used for data-adaptive selection of the length of the designed cross-color directional filter. Fusing estimates from multiple directions provides the final anisotropic denoised and interpolated values. The full-size RGB image is obtained by placing these values into the corresponding positions in the image grid. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated by experimental results with simulated and real camera data.