Variable Macropixel Spectral-Spatial Transforms with Intra- and Inter-color Decorrelations for Arbitrary RGB CFA-Sampled Raw Images

A raw image captured by a color filter array (CFA), such as a Bayer pattern, is usually compressed after demosaicing with some processings (denoising, deblurring, tone-mapping, and so on). However, since photographers, designers, and high-end users prefer to work with the raw image sampled by CFA (referred to as “raw image”) directly, a raw image should be compressed before demosaicing. For effective raw image compression, this study introduces variable macropixel spectral-spatial transforms (VMSSTs), that can successfully decorrelate not only Bayer raw images but any other pure-color (RGB) ones. The proposed VMSSTs are designed by the following two steps: 1) intra-color decorrelation and 2) inter-color decorrelation. In lossless compression with JPEG 2000, compared with methods which do not use transforms, the VMSSTs reduced the average bitrates of three types of CFAs: from approximately 0.09 to 0.12 bpp for the modified Bayer CFA, from 0.25 to 0.65 bpp for the diagonal stripe CFA, and from 0.33 to 0.70 bpp for the Fujifilm X-Trans CFA due to their high color decorrelation efficiency. In addition, in lossy compression with JPEG 2000, compared with a rearranged method, the VMSSTs improved the average bitrates of the Bjontegaard delta by around 3.97%, 14.95%, and 18.65% for each CFA model, respectively. Although a data-dependent adaptive transformation, the Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT), showed the best performance in lossy compression, the introduced VMSSTs have shown performances comparable to those of the KLT in lossless compression, despite their simple structures.