Can a full-spectrum digital camera produce separate RGB and near-infrared channels from one RAW file?
Asked 6/21/2016
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I converted a Sony compact camera to full-spectrum by removing the internal IR-cut filter, and I can also add an IR-pass filter so it records near-infrared light. Can a standard Bayer sensor be processed to recover four separate bands—red, green, blue, and near-infrared—from a single RAW image, or otherwise split the RGB channels into different infrared bands?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
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Not really. If you want to take a hack at it, the first thing you'll need is the transmittance curves of your (presumably Bayer) color filter. Then,if you're lucky, there's an NIR wavelength at which at least two color filters have some responsivity, and those color filters have no overlap in the visible range. In such a case, you could play with sum and difference values for the pixels corresponding to those two colors and perhaps tease some NIR-only data out of the mess.
I sincerely doubt, based on the Bayer filter curves I'm familiar with, that you'll have any luck doing this. Frankly, the best way to get NIR images would be to take two exposures, one with and one without the NIR filter in place, and difference those.
Originally by user25396. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user25396
10y ago
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In general, no. A normal Bayer sensor only gives you three filtered pixel types, and those color filters are broad and overlapping. After removing the camera’s IR-cut filter, the Bayer filters still do not become clean, separate infrared bands, so you can’t reliably recover four independent channels (R, G, B, and NIR) from one RAW file.
In theory, if you had the exact spectral response curves of the sensor and Bayer filters, you might try to mathematically separate some IR contribution, but the overlap is usually too large for this to work well.
Also, most commonly available IR filters are long-pass filters, not narrow band-pass filters, so they don’t divide infrared into distinct bands for the RGB channels.
A practical approach is to make two exposures—one with visible light included and one with an IR-pass filter—and compare or subtract them to isolate infrared influence.
You can also create false-color infrared images by remapping channels (for example, IR to red, red to green, green to blue), but that is a creative rendering, not true four-band capture.
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