An Effective Bicubic Convolution Interpolation-Based Iterative Luma Optimization for Enhancing Quality in Chroma Subsampling

Traditionally, prior to compressing an RGB full-color image, for each converted
$2\times 2$
CbCr block
$B^{CbCr}$
, chroma subsampling only downsamples
$B^{CbCr}$
, but without changing the luma block
$B^{Y}$
at all. In the current research, a special linear interpolation-based, namely the COPY-based, chroma subsampling-first luma modification (CSFLM) study has attempted to change the luma block for enhancing the quality of the reconstructed RGB full-color image. In this paper, a fast and effective nonlinear interpolation, namely the bicubic convolution interpolation (BCI), based iterative luma modification method for CSFLM is proposed. In our iterative method, a BCI-based distortion function and its convex property proof are first provided. Next, based on the proposed convex distortion function, a pseudoinverse technique is applied to obtain the initial luma modification solution, and then an iterative method is proposed to improve the initial luma modification solution. Based on five testing image datasets, namely the IMAX, Kodak, SCI (screen content images), CI (classical images), and Video datasets, the thorough experimental results have demonstrated that on the newly released Versatile Video Coding (VVC) platform VTM-12.0, our iterative luma modification method achieves substantial quality, execution-time, and quality-bitrate tradeoff improvements when compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods.