Chrominance signal interpolation of YUV 4:2:0 format color images.

The YUV 4:2:0 format is a representative format for color images in international standards. In this format, both color difference components U and V reduce the number of pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions by one-half. Consequently, this reduction degrades the color difference components. At a relatively high bit rate, the degradation produced by reducing the number of pixels is often worse than the degradation that depends on the coding. Thus, processing to compensate for the degradation due to the format transform becomes necessary. The pixels of the color difference components reduced once on the encoding side are determined by interpolation on the decoding side. The typical interpolation methods are bilinear interpolation, bicubic interpolation, and interpolation by a finite impulse response (FIR) filter. When these interpolation methods were applied to interpolate the color difference components in the YUV 4:2:0 format, blur and lower saturation were produced in the colors in the color difference components returned to the original number of pixels. In this paper, we propose a method that uses information in the luminance component not having a reduced number of pixels to interpolate the color difference components in the YUV 4:2:0 format. Consequently, color blurring is prevented in the edges of the image, and an objective is to improve the saturation in the entire image. We based the proposed method on bilinear interpolation and bicubic interpolation, and formulated an interpolation method using the luminance component as an extended form. The proposed method and the bicubic interpolation are compared in both objective and subjective evaluations, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 89(9): 1–10, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (<URL>www.interscience.wiley.com</URL>). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20218 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]