A color demosaicing method has been developed that effectively performs within local areas that are rich in high spatial frequency variations. Such areas are likely to cause strong artifacts after demosaicing because of the inherent difficulty in subsampling. In visually tolerable image restoration, the spatial correlation between different color components is exploited to consistently maintain favorable transitions in the component intensities. Missing primary color values on the Bayer pattern color filter array are estimated using an edge-directed interpolation of primary color difference signals. The local transitions of the primary color differences are then smoothed by spatially adaptive filtering. Experimental results showed objectively-good and visually-preferable performance in terms of PSNR, CIELAB color difference and visual appearance, particularly resulting in less false color.