ABSTRACT

The image processing pipeline of a camera is the sequence of steps in which a digital image is formed, and both the ordering as well as the particular algorithm used in each stage are important [320, 223]. Though camera makers usually don’t make public this information, digital cameras commonly perform the following operations, which we’ll introduce in this chapter and then discuss in more detail in the remainder of the book: demosaicking, black level adjustment, white balance, color correction, gamma correction, noise reduction, contrast and color enhancement, and compression. At the end of the chapter we’ll briefly discuss criteria for the ordering of these operations. Figure 3.1, taken from the survey by Ramanath et al. [320] shows the schematic of a pipeline.