Multispectral filter array (MSFA) imaging enables snapshot spectral acquisition, but its per-band sparse sampling causes severe spatial aliasing. Although missing spatial structures can be inferred across bands, wavelength-dependent contrast variations make direct cross-band transfer unreliable. Existing model-based methods lack explicit magnitude-invariant mechanisms, and learning-based methods require layout-specific training or per-image tuning, limiting generalization. To address these issues, we propose S3D-Mosaic, a model-based spectral demosaicing method built upon a subgradient-guided cross-band structure transfer framework. We first establish a subgradient-guided regularization framework with a generalized cosine-similarity interpretation, providing a convex mechanism for magnitude-invariant information transfer. Then we design a compact Directional Sparse Equivariant Difference Convolution (DSE-DConv) for band-level extraction of orientation-selective, high-frequency structure features at low computational cost. Instantiating the framework with DSE-DConv on spectrally adjacent bands yields a cross-band self-structure similarity regularizer for spectral demosaicing, which we optimize via a dual-scan ADMM algorithm that decouples the bidirectional dependency while propagating magnitude-robust structural information across bands. With DSE-DConv's two parameters trained once via self-supervision, S3D-Mosaic outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on CAVE and NTIRE 2022, and generalizes robustly to varying MSFA layouts, pan-mosaic fusion, and real-world UAV data with fixed reconstruction hyperparameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/bestwishes43/S3D-Mosaic.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Illustration of the proposed S3D-Mosaic pipeline: (i) a subgradient-guided optimization framework is developed to realize magnitude-invariant cross-band feature-direction transfer; (ii) the compact DSE-DConv operator is designed and self-supervisedly trained as a structural feature extractor; (iii) a cross-band self-structure similarity prior is instantiated for spectral demosaicing and optimized using a dual-scan ADMM algorithm.
Fig. 2: Illustration of the MSFA observation. Left: actual mosaic observation model from hyperspectral image (HSI) to raw; Middle: equivalent per-band subsampling model; Right: spatial aliasing caused by sparse sampling.
Fig. 3: Illustration of the DSE-DConv module and its adjoint operator. The right part shows the speed-optimized implementation with only 2HW multiplications.
Fig. 4: Visualization of feature direction similarity using DSE-DConv. a) Inter-band similarity; b) neighboring-band similarity. The visualization is based on scene 0901 of the NTIRE 2022 spectral demosaicing dataset.
Parameter
S3D-Mosaic
S3D-Mosaic ∗
ADMM iterations T
100
100
Initial penalty ρ0
1×10−3
1×10−3
Initial structure weight μ0
1×10−3
1×10−3
Penalty growth factor γρ
1.8
1.8
ρ update interval
10
10
Z-subproblem FPI iterations Kz
45
45
TABLE I: Hyperparameter settings for the proposed methods. All parameters are fixed across datasets.
Metrics
Methods
balloons
beads
cd
chart
clay
cloth
bears
feathers
flowers
oil
AVG
PSNR ↑
WB
36.75
24.93
35.70
27.25
36.83
27.18
32.96
28.94
34.73
30.63
31.59
ItSD
37.12
23.37
32.55
30.55
34.69
31.53
36.17
31.46
35.26
32.34
32.50
PPID
38.89
26.24
36.60
29.00
38.34
28.54
35.61
31.00
37.12
31.05
33.24
USD (TIP, 2024)
40.93
27.22
36.64
31.29
39.87
30.93
38.74
32.64
38.76
32.47
34.95
UnNull (TIP, 2025)
43.66
31.28
36.41
34.93
42.89
34.44
41.63
37.38
41.01
34.55
37.82
S3D-Mosaic
46.61
31.09
37.71
37.73
45.72
36.02
43.98
38.80
45.04
36.05
39.88
TABLE II: Quantitative comparison on the CAVE spectral demosaicing dataset. Best and second best are bold and underlined , respectively
Metrics
UnNull (TIP, 2025)
WB
ItSD
PPID
USD (TIP, 2024)
S3D-Mosaic
S3D-Mosaic*
PSNR ↑
29.68±4.10
35.00±3.54
34.96±3.37
37.71±3.53
43.39±3.58
43.97 ±3.91
44.75 ±4.10
SAM ↓
9.455±0.854
3.800±1.404
4.413±1.417
3.263±1.339
2.223±0.960
1.876 ±0.867
1.722 ±0.819
SSIM ↑
0.850±0.082
0.922±0.060
0.931±0.030
0.953±0.037
0.981±0.014
0.985 ±0.010
0.987 ±0.010
TABLE III: Quantitative comparison on the NTIRE 2022 spectral demosaicing dataset. Best and second best are bold and underlined , respectively.
Metrics
Methods
beans
oil
paints
photo
pompoms
apples
peppers
sponges
toys
superballs
spools
watercolors
AVG
PSNR ↑
PPID-PanGAN
32.37
34.90
32.22
38.66
33.81
39.34
38.76
31.19
33.46
35.36
35.38
32.77
34.85
LSAN-WFANet
30.16
33.05
30.89
38.04
36.32
41.25
39.23
33.70
35.88
37.79
37.48
29.88
35.31
LSAN-PanGAN
32.47
35.44
33.01
39.73
37.87
43.06
41.15
34.01
36.98
39.02
39.86
32.70
37.11
EFN (TIP, 2026)
36.98
37.67
37.56
41.66
39.25
47.09
46.30
38.87
39.52
42.48
43.26
36.05
40.56
EBVIF (TPAMI, 2026)
37.56
38.59
36.47
41.83
41.88
45.79
45.47
39.25
41.23
41.53
43.39
38.14
40.93
S3D-Mosaic
39.84
39.81
39.74
42.51
42.84
50.08
49.91
42.33
44.16
46.04
45.50
40.39
43.60
TABLE IV: Quantitative comparison on the CAVE pan-mosaic fusion dataset. Best and second best are bold and underlined , respectively
LR
Feat.
Sub.
Initial
PSNR ↑
SAM ↓
SSIM ↑
HS
16.43
76.398
0.115
✓
HS
16.43
76.398
0.115
✓
HS
34.56
2.987
0.897
✓
✓
HS
34.64
2.968
0.898
✓
✓
HS
43.97
1.876
0.985
✓
✓
✓
HS
44.75
1.722
0.987
TABLE V: Ablation of prior components under different initializations on the NTIRE 2022 validation set.
CD
DS
GE
PSNR ↑
SAM ↓
SSIM ↑
Mult. Comp.
34.88
7.186
0.927
72HW
✓
22.02
21.883
0.634
64HW
✓
32.12
10.274
0.880
24HW
✓
25.48
19.971
0.645
9HW
✓
✓
39.70
4.692
0.972
16HW
✓
✓
21.59
23.885
0.594
8HW
TABLE VI: Ablation study on the central difference (CD), directional sparsity (DS), and group equivariance (GE) properties. Training is performed on NTIRE 2022 spectral demosaicing and testing on CAVE.
Fig. 5: False-color (R:570 nm, G:540 nm, B:454 nm) visual comparison of selected scenes on the real dataset. For each scene, the left column shows a zoomed region indicated in the raw image, and the right column displays the channel-averaged spatial frequency spectrum of the reconstructed scenes.
Fig. 6: The MSFA layout of the real dataset.
Methods
S01
S02
S03
S04
S05
S06
WB
7.143
6.944
7.978
8.032
7.562
7.826
ItSD
6.321
6.827
7.634
7.439
6.907
6.130
PPID
6.141
5.733
6.440
6.144
5.944
4.725
UnNull
6.257
6.154
6.368
5.525
4.804
4.531
S3D-Mosaic
4.378
4.725
4.941
4.816
4.289
3.834
TABLE VII: Quantitative comparison on the real dataset.
Multispectral demosaicing is crucial to reconstruct full-resolution spectral images from snapshot mosaiced measurements, enabling real-time imaging from neurosurgery to autonomous driving. Classical methods are blurry, while supervised learning requires costly ground truth (GT) obtained from slow line-scanning systems. We propose Perspective-Equivariant Fine-tuning for Demosaicing (PEFD), a framework that learns multispectral demosaicing from mosaiced measurements alone. PEFD a) exploits the projective geometry of camera-based imaging systems to leverage a richer group structure than previous demosaicing methods to recover more null-space information, and b) learns efficiently without GT by adapting pretrained foundation models designed for 1-3 channel imaging. On surgical and automotive datasets, PEFD recovers fine details such as blood vessels and preserves spectral fidelity, substantially outperforming recent approaches, nearing supervised performance. Furthermore, the performance of PEFD is demonstrated on raw, unprocessed data from a commercial multispectral sensor. Code is at https://github.com/Andrewwango/pefd.
Image demosaicing reconstructs a full-color image from incomplete color measurements produced by a sensor covered with a color filter array (CFA). Most existing methods formulate demosaicing as pixel-level reconstruction and mainly rely on local textures, cross-channel correlations, and low-level image statistics. Our core insight is that reconstruction and visual understanding can be viewed as complementary views of shared scene structure: both are grounded in the same underlying physical world, and therefore the structural and physical information inferred from an image should remain consistent across the two tasks. We instantiate this idea with instance segmentation and propose SegDem, a cross-task decoder representation transfer framework for demosaicing. SegDem first learns region- and boundary-aware representations through instance-aware structural pretraining and then transfers the decoder to RAW-conditioned reconstruction. Segmentation- and demosaicing-conditioned features are further anchored to a shared frozen DINOv2 representation space to preserve structural organization across tasks. We instantiate SegDem with convolutional, Transformer-based, and state-space backbones for unified Single- and Quad-Bayer demosaicing. Extensive experiments on synthetic, external, and challenging datasets demonstrate consistent improvements across different architectures and CFA layouts.
Ping Chen, Xiangming Wang, Yongyong Chen +5
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Nanjing University (Suzhou)
Joint demosaicing and denoising is a fundamental step in camera image signal processing, yet remains challenging because different Bayer-like color filter arrays (CFAs) and sensor noise jointly corrupt both color sampling and image content. Existing unified restoration networks explicitly model CFA geometry but are still driven primarily by pixel-level supervision, making them prone to structural degradation around edges, repetitive textures, and moiré patterns where local evidence is unreliable. We attribute this limitation partly to the absence of explicit structural guidance beyond pixel-level reconstruction supervision. Motivated by this observation, we propose a structural-guided unified restoration framework that injects pretrained structural knowledge into CFA-aware image restoration. Our model receives a unified five-channel observation consisting of the raw mosaic, CFA masks, and a noise-level map. A SwinIR restoration branch reconstructs pixel details under CFA-conditioned modulation, while a parallel structural reasoning branch extracts complementary structural cues from a sparse pseudo-RGB observation. To bridge the substantial domain gap between sparse noisy sensor data and the natural-image pretraining domain of the structural encoder, we introduce a lightweight trainable adapter before residually fusing structural and restoration features. A shared decoder jointly predicts the restored RGB image and an auxiliary clean mosaic, providing supervision in both image and sensor domains. Extensive experiments across multiple CFA patterns and noise levels demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art unified and CFA-specific methods, indicating that adapted structural priors can enhance robust camera image restoration. The source codes and dataset are provided in the supplementary material.
Qixin Zheng, Ping Chen, Qiangqiang Shen +1
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, China