Verge of CFA Diversity Era?

MDPI paper "The Effect of the Color Filter Array Layout Choice on State-of-the-Art Demosaicing" by Ana Stojkovic, Ivana Shopovska, Hiep Luong, Jan Aelterman, Ljubomir Jovanov, and Wilfried Philips from Ghent University, Belgium comes up with an interesting statement:

"In this study, by comparing performance of two state-of-the-art generic algorithms, we evaluate the potential of modern CFA-demosaicing. We test the hypothesis that, with the increasing power of NN-based demosaicing, the influence of optimal CFA design on system performance decreases. This hypothesis is supported with the experimental results. Such a finding would herald the possibility of relaxing CFA requirements, providing more freedom in the CFA design choice and producing high-quality cameras.

From this study, we derive a conclusion about the constantly increasing reconstruction power of the modern learning based demosaicing algorithms towards adaptiveness to any CFA design without loss in the reconstruction quality (which used to be dependent on the quality of the CFA design). This conclusion leads to a finding regarding the future opportunities for camera manufacturing and image reconstruction, specifically in combining lower hardware requirements with powerful reconstruction techniques. In other words, this means that, with the modern learning-based demosaicing methods, camera manufacturers have more freedom in the choice of the CFA pattern layout, without a noticeable loss in the image quality. In that direction, the patterns can be adapted to improve other image properties and facilitate various imaging tasks, such as the Quad Bayer that was designed to improve noise reduction in low-light imaging."