Robust Joint Image Reconstruction from Color and Monochrome Cameras

Recent years have seen an explosion of the number of camera modules integrated into individual consumer mobile devices, including configurations that contain multiple different types of image sensors. One popular configuration is to combine an RGB camera for color imaging with a monochrome camera that has improved performance in low-light settings, as well as some sensitivity in the infrared. In this work we introduce a method to combine simultaneously captured images from such a two-camera stereo system to generate a high-quality, noise reduced color image. To do so, pixel-topixel alignment has to be constructed between the two captured monochrome and color images, which however, is prone to artifacts due to parallax. The joint image reconstruction 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.