Combining vector ordering and spatial information for color image interpolation

A new idea for color image zooming techniques is introduced in this paper. Conventional interpolation techniques usually utilize only the spatial information of the neighborhood color pixels around the interpolation positions and do not consider their vectorial characteristics. This paper presents a novel color image interpolation method, which takes both the spatial information and vectorial characteristics into consideration. By combining the spatial distance and the vector-aggregated distance associated with each neighborhood color pixel, the proposed solution first determines the importance of each neighborhood pixel to the current interpolated pixel and then employs a data-adaptive vector filter to estimate the new interpolated pixel. The extensive simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed interpolator by yielding excellent visual effect and showing significant performance improvement over the conventional and other vector filtering based interpolation methods in terms of objective image quality measures.