Fundamentals and HW/SW Partitioning

The main goal of this Chapter is devoted to provide all the fundamental basis related to the involved technological issues relative to the single-sensor imaging devices. A rough understanding of the overall ingredients of a typical imaging pipeline is important also to consider the performance of any imaging devices, from low to high level, as the result of several components that run together to compose a complex system. The final image/video quality is the result of a certain number of design choices, that involve, in almost all cases, all aspects of the hardware and software technology. As briefly stated in the preface, the book aims to cover all aspects of algorithms and methods for the processing of digital images acquired by imaging consumer devices. More specifically, we will introduce the fundamental basis of specific processing into CFA (Color Filter Array) domain such as demosaicing, enhancement, denoising, compression together with ad-hoc matrixing, color balancing and exposure correction techniques devoted to preprocess input data coming from the sensor. We conclude the Chapter just including some related issues related to the intrinsic modularity of the pipeline together with a brief description of the hardware/software partitioning design phase.