"A Novel Color Filter Array and Demosaicking Algorithm for Hexagonal Grids" published

It took quite a while but now our paper "A Novel Color Filter Array and Demosaicking Algorithm for Hexagonal Grids" is online at SPIE. Follow the link to download it.

The main idea presented in this paper is to replace the square grid, which is typically used in digital imaging with a hexagonal grid. This alone is not a new idea, there have been people in the past who thought about using hexagonal pixels. However, we also propose a color filter array for such a grid. Remember, color filter arrays are used to make an image sensor capture color images, by letting every single pixel capture only one of three primary colors. And because this alone is not very helpful, we also provide a demosaicking algorithm for this CFA.

So here´s our CFA:

Hexagonal Color Filter Array

As you can see, its color distribution is very different to that of the Bayer pattern. 6 out of 9 pixels on our grid are green, which allows for very good luminance interpoaltion, without using cross-channel information. There are quite few red and blue pixels on our grid. This does actually not matter in most cases as we can use cross-channel information for the interpolation of these.