Joint Chroma Downsampling and Upsampling for Screen Content Image

Screen content images are originally captured in a full-chroma format. The chroma downsampling, which is commonly applied to the chroma component in screen content image representation and processing (e.g., YUV4:2:0 compression), will significantly degrade the image quality and create annoying artifacts such as blur and color shifting. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose luma aware chroma downsampling and upsampling algorithms to jointly improve the quality of the chroma image reconstruction. Guided by the luma information, the chroma upsampling algorithm is proposed with the utilization of major color and index map representation. The geometric information-based linear mapping is developed to transfer the structure of luma to the interpolated chroma. Subsequently, the error sensitivity of the upsampling method is analyzed, and content dependent downsampling algorithm is presented to minimize the error sensitivity function. We further explore the applicability of the proposed scheme in the scenario of screen content compression, targeting at improving the decoded chroma image quality for display. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the viability and efficiency of the proposed scheme.