The nature of photography, particularly in the digital era, is multifaceted and profoundly intertwined with advanced technological processes. Fundamentally, modern photography is a complex art of signal processing, replete with layers of abstraction and sophistication that often go unnoticed. At the heart of digital photography lies the Bayer pattern, a clever configuration designed to mimic human vision and maximize the efficiency of image capture.
The Bayer pattern is structured as RGGB, with a distinct emphasis on green light, which occupies 50% of the sensor’s filter. This design taps into a critical facet of human vision—our eyes’ heightened sensitivity to green light, which significantly contributes to our perception of brightness and detail. This privileging of green in the sensor configuration is not just about color balance but also about capturing luminosity with high spatial resolution. As such, many advanced demosaicing algorithms are structured to first reconstruct the green channel to establish a high-resolution luminance map. Once this is achieved, the red and blue signals are interpolated, serving as “color difference” layers that are less critical in spatial resolution due to the human eye’s lower sensitivity to color detail.