• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.174-184
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• 2008

Complementary color filter array (CCFA) is widely used in consumer-level digital video cameras, since it not only has high sensitivity and good signal-to-noise ratio in low-light condition but also is compatible with the interlaced scanning used in broadcast systems. However, the full-color images obtained from CCFA suffer from the color artifacts such as false color and zipper effects. These artifacts can be removed with edge-adaptive demosaicking (ECD) approaches which are generally used in rrimary color filter array (PCFA). Unfortunately, the unique array pattern of CCFA makes it difficult that CCFA adopts ECD approaches. Therefore, to apply ECD approaches suitable for CCFA to demosaicking is one of the major issues to reconstruct the full-color images. In this paper, we propose a new ECD algorithm for CCFA. To estimate an edge direction precisely and enhance the quality of the reconstructed image, a function of spatial variances is used as a weight, and new color conversion matrices are presented for considering various edge directions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional method with respect to both objective and subjective criteria.

• Current Optics and Photonics
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.485-495
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• 2023

The pixel size in high-resolution complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors continues to shrink due to chip size limitations. However, the pixel pitch's miniaturization causes deterioration of optical performance. As one solution, a quad color filter (CF) array with pixel binning has been developed to enhance sensitivity. For high sensitivity, the microlens structure also needs to be optimized as the CF arrays change. In this paper, the covered microlens, which consist of four microlenses covered by one large microlens, are proposed for the quad CF array in the backside illumination pixel structure. To evaluate the optical performance, the suggested microlens structure was simulated from 0.5 ㎛ to 1.0 ㎛ pixels at the center and edge of the sensors. Moreover, all pixel structures were compared with and without in-pixel deep trench isolation (DTI), which works to distribute incident light uniformly into each photodiode. The suggested structure was evaluated with an optical simulation using the finite-difference time-domain method for numerical analysis of the optical characteristics. Compared to the conventional microlens, the suggested microlens show 29.1% and 33.9% maximum enhancement of sensitivity at the center and edge of the sensor, respectively. Therefore, the covered microlens demonstrated the highly sensitive image sensor with a quad CF array.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.51-58
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• 2010

This paper proposes an edge adaptive color interpolation for an ultra-small HD-grade complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) video sensor in camera phones that can process 720-p/30-fps videos. Recently, proposed methods with great image quality perceptually reconstruct the green component and then estimate the red/blue component using the reconstructed green and neighbor red and blue pixels. However, these methods require the bulky memory line buffers in order to temporally store the reconstructed green components. The edge adaptive color interpolation method uses seven or nine patterns to calculate the six edge directions. At the same time, the threshold values are adaptively adjusted by the sum of the color values of the selected pixels. This method selects the suitable one among the patterns using two flowcharts proposed in this paper, and then interpolates the missing color values. For verification, we calculated the peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) in the test images, which were processed by the proposed algorithm, and compared the calculated PSNR of the existing methods. The proposed color interpolation is also fabricated with the 0.18-${\mu}m$ CMOS flash memory process.