Survey of demosaicking methods for polarization filter array images

Abstract

Snapshot polarization imaging has gained interest in the last few decades. Recent research and technology achievements defined the polarization Filter Array (PFA). It is dedicated to division-of-focal plane polarimeters, which permits to analyze the direction of light electric field oscillation. Its filters form a mosaicked pattern, in which each pixel only senses a fraction of the total polarization states, so the other missing polarization states have to be interpolated. As for Color or Spectral Filter Arrays (CFA or SFA), several dedicated demosaicking methods exist in the PFA literature. Such methods are mainly based on spatial correlation disregarding inter-channel correlation. We show that polarization channels are strongly correlated in images. We therefore propose to extend some demosaicking methods from CFA/SFA to PFA, and compare them with those that are PFA-oriented. Objective and subjective analysis show that the pseudo panchromatic image difference method provides the best results and can be used as benchmark for PFA demosaicking.