Robust Joint Image Reconstruction from Color and Monochrome Cameras

International audience; Recent years have seen an explosion of the number of camera modules integratedinto individual consumer mobile devices, including configurations that contain multi-ple different types of image sensors. One popular configuration is to combine an RGBcamera for color imaging with a monochrome camera that has improved performancein low-light settings, as well as some sensitivity in the infrared. In this work we in-troduce a method to combine simultaneously captured images from such a two-camerastereo system to generate a high-quality, noise reduced color image. To do so, pixel-to-pixel alignment has to be constructed between the two captured monochrome and colorimages, which however, is prone to artifacts due to parallax. The joint image recon-struction is made robust by introducing a novel artifact-robust optimization formulation.We provide extensive experimental results based on the two-camera configuration of a commercially available cell phone.