On Sparse Representations of Color Images

We investigate an intrinsic and useful form of sparsity of color images that was largely overlooked in the literature of image/video processing. This sparsity of multispectral images is revealed and formulated by modeling the image formation process. The underlying new sparse representations of color images are general and can be exploited to improve the performance of existing image restoration algorithms, such as denoising, deblurring, and resolution upconversion.