Designing a Color Filter with High Overall Transmittance for Improving the Color Accuracy of Digital Cameras

Previously improved color accuracy of a given digital camera was achieved by carefully designing the spectral transmittance of a color filter to be placed in front of the camera. Specifically, the filter is designed in a way that the spectral sensitivities of the camera after filtering are approximately linearly related to the color matching functions (or tristimulus values) of the human visual system. To avoid filters that absorbed too much light, the optimization could incorporate a minimum per wavelength transmittance constraint. In this paper, we change the optimization so that the overall filter transmittance is bounded, i.e. we solve for the filter that (for a uniform white light) transmits (say) 50% of the light. Experiments demonstrate that these filters continue to solve the color correction problem (they make cameras much more colorimetric). Significantly, the optimal filters by restraining the average transmittance can deliver a further 10% improvement in terms of color accuracy compared to the prior art of bounding the low transmittance.

Mitigation of Striping Noise in ATMS Calibration Counts by Symmetric Filters

Global observations from the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership satellite are affected by striping-patterned noise. An optimal symmetric filter method to mitigate the striping noise in warm counts, cold counts, warm load temperatures, and scene counts instead of antenna temperatures is developed and tested in this study. The optimal filters are developed based on the results free of striping noise obtained with a striping noise detecting method by combining the principal component analysis and the ensemble empirical mode decomposition. The two-point algorithm is then used to calculate antenna temperatures with warm counts, cold counts, warm load temperatures, and scene counts before and after applying the optimal filters. The necessity of applying the striping noise mitigation to the scene counts besides the calibration counts (warm and cold counts) is also shown. This explains why the traditional method to smooth only calibration counts has failed to remove the ATMS striping noise. The optimal filters proposed in this study, which remove the high-frequency striping noise without altering low-frequency weather signals, outperform the conventional boxcar filters adopted in the current operational ATMS calibration system.