Improving the Performance of Single Chip Image Capture Devices

Single chip charge-coupled devices (CCDs) coupled with filters for isolating red, green, and blue color content are commonly used to capture color images. While this is more cost effective than multiple chip systems, best results are obtained when full RGB color information is obtained for every point in an image. The process of color subsampling in a single chip system degrades the resulting image data by introducing artifacts such as blurry edges and false coloring. We propose an algorithm for enhancing color image data that were captured with a typical single chip CCD array. The algorithm is based on stochastic regularization using a Markov random field model for the image data. This results in a constrained optimization problem, which is solved using an iterative constrained gradient descent computational algorithm. Results of the proposed algorithm show a marked improvement over the original sampled image data.