How to best combine demosaicing and denoising?

Image demosaicing and denoising play a critical role in the raw imaging pipeline. These processes have often been treated as independent, without considering their interactions. Indeed, most classic denoising methods handle noisy RGB images, not raw images. Conversely, most demosaicing methods address the demosaicing of noise free images. The real problem is to jointly denoise and demosaic noisy raw images. But the question of how to proceed is still not clarified. In this paper, we carry out extensive experiments and a mathematical analysis to tackle this problem by low complexity algorithms. Indeed, both problems have only been addressed jointly by end-to-end heavy-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are currently incompatible with low-power portable imaging devices and remain by nature domain (or device) dependent. Our study leads us to conclude that, with moderate noise, demosaicing should be applied first, followed by denoising. This requires a simple adaptation of classic denoising algorithms to demosaiced noise, which we justify and specify. Although our main conclusion is 'demosaic first, then denoise,' we also discover that for high noise, there is a moderate PSNR gain by a more complex strategy: partial CFA denoising followed by demosaicing and by a second denoising on the RGB image. These surprising results are obtained by a black-box optimization of the pipeline, which could be applied to any other pipeline. We validate our results on simulated and real noisy CFA images obtained from several benchmarks.