Monochrome and Color Polarization Demosaicking Using Edge-Aware Residual Interpolation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an edge-aware residual interpolation method for monochrome and color polarization demosaicking, significantly improving image quality by effectively detecting edges and interpolating missing pixels.

Contribution

It proposes a novel edge detection guided interpolation technique for polarization image demosaicking and extends it to color images, supported by a new polarization image dataset.

Findings

EARI outperforms existing demosaicking methods in quality.

The method effectively preserves edges and details in polarization images.

Experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed approach.

Abstract

A division-of-focal-plane or microgrid image polarimeter enables us to acquire a set of polarization images in one shot. Since the polarimeter consists of an image sensor equipped with a monochrome or color polarization filter array (MPFA or CPFA), the demosaicking process to interpolate missing pixel values plays a crucial role in obtaining high-quality polarization images. In this paper, we propose a novel MPFA demosaicking method based on edge-aware residual interpolation (EARI) and also extend it to CPFA demosaicking. The key of EARI is a new edge detector for generating an effective guide image used to interpolate the missing pixel values. We also present a newly constructed full color-polarization image dataset captured using a 3-CCD camera and a rotating polarizer. Using the dataset, we experimentally demonstrate that our EARI-based method outperforms existing methods in MPFA and CPFA demosaicking.