A method of filtering an image filter is disclosed. The filter is provided for a digital camera including image sensors sensitive to light, a color filter placed over sensitive elements of the sensors and patterned according to a Bayer mosaic pattern layout and an interpolation algorithm joining together the digital information provided by differently colored adjacent pixels in said Bayer pattern. The filter is adaptive and includes a noise level computation block for operating directly on a sai...

A programmable data reformatter reorders output from an image sensor to yield various formats. The reformatting applies to reduced resolution output from large image sensors as in digital cameras operating in video mode, and converts an irregular video mode output to a standard format, such as Bayer pattern, for image processing.

The image reading device comprises an imaging device on which an on-chip color filter is provided. The on-chip color filter has color filter elements of the Bayer arrangement, for example. Pixel data, output from the imaging device, are stored in a memory. When the pixel data are read from the memory, some of the pixel data are thinned out, so that a thinned image data, colors of which are arranged in the same arrangement as the color filter elements of the imaging device, is obtained. The pixel...

A solid-state image-sensing element 1 is fed with, from a coupling controller 4, a signal .phi.Sv that couples together the photoelectric conversion portions of every predetermined number of vertically adjacent pixels and a signal .phi.Sh that couples together the photoelectric conversion portions of every predetermined number of horizontally adjacent pixels. This sets the numbers of pixels of which the photoelectric conversion portions are coupled together horizontally and vertically. A pixel o...

A color solid-state imaging apparatus of the present invention includes a read pixel position selecting section for selecting read pixel positions such that in two directions crossing each other, a first pixel pair of horizontally-adjacent pixels corresponding to a first color filter segment and one of a second color filter segment and a third color filter segment and a second pixel pair of vertically-adjacent pixels corresponding to a first color filter segment and the one or the other one of a...

An improved digital camera that produces digital images of high qualities without using expensive image sensors and optics is disclosed. The disclosed digital cameras use multiple image sensors with multiple lenses. One of the multiple image sensors is made to be responsive to all intensity information in visible color spectrum and a (gray intensity) image resulting from the sensor is used to compensate lost information in images from other image sensors responsive to certain colors. A final col...

A high sensitivity, single chip, low light level imaging device is provided. The imaging device of the present invention utilizes sparse color sampling, to maximize the luminance information gathered. In particular, color information is gathered by a small proportion of the pixels included in an image sensor, while the remaining pixels operate at full spectrum sensitivity. The present invention allows the correct hue of objects to be determined, while providing high sensitivity to available lumi...

An optimized color filter array is formed in, above or below a one or more damascene layers. The color filter array includes filter regions which are configured to optimize the combined optical properties of the layers of the device to maximize the intensity of the particular wavelength of light incident to a respective underlying photodiode.

A digital camera includes a CCD imager mounted at a front with a primary color filter. An optimal shutter speed is calculated based on a camera signal outputted from the CCD imager upon a pre-exposure. Where a calculated optimal shutter speed is low, a timing generator drives the CCD imager by a pixel-mixing scheme. Charges are first read out of part of the light receiving elements and transferred in a vertical direction. When the charges are transferred by a predetermined distance, the remainin...

A demosaic system and method that supports multiple CFA pattern inputs is disclosed. The demosaic system is capable of handling both RGB Bayer input and CMYG input and perform demosaic operations on both inputs to recover full-color images from the raw input images. The system uses a variable number gradient demosiac process. The process uses a 5.times.5 neighborhood of sensor pixel data centered at the pixel under consideration. The process calculates a set of gradients corresponding to differe...