THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

ii Most consumer digital cameras capture colour images using a single light sensor and a colour filter array (CFA). This results in a mosaic image being captured, where at each pixel location either a red, green, or blue sample is obtained. The two missing colours at each location must be interpolated from the surrounding samples in a process known as demosaicking. In most current digital cameras, demosaicking is carried out in RGB colour space and later the image or video is converted to YCbCr 4:2:0 format and compressed with standard methods. Most previous research on demosaicking and compression in digital cameras has addressed the issues separately. That is, current demosaicking methods ignore the fact that the data will later be compressed, and compression techniques ignore the fact that the data was captured with a CFA. In this thesis we propose two methods for optimizing the demosaicking and compression processes in digital cameras. First we propose a fast demosaicking method that directly produces an image in YCbCr 4:2:0 format (the colour format mos