An improvement of efficient nonlinear color image interpolator: Theory and FPGA implementation

Abstract

In this paper, a new proposal for a nonlinear edge-preserving interpolator and hardware implementation is presented. As a new idea for a color image interpolator, our proposal is focusing on the interpolated pixel and we tried to adjust it in order to have better quality. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed idea for preserving images, we implemented it using different color images and we evaluated using different evaluation measurements. Then, we compared our new proposal with the traditional nonlinear Edge preserving interpolator. The obtained results confirm that our proposed Edge preserving is better than the old interpolator. It also demonstrates consistent image quality performance among a variety of images. The hardware implementation based on FPGA shows that we are able to gain image quality without increasing the size of the circuit once implemented in hardware. We show that our proposed interpolator for Edge preserving improves considerably the image quality and represents a fast solution when implemented in hardware. Despite a small increase in FPGA resources, we obtain an average improvement of the image quality of about 35.75% using the NCD metric.