An improved universal subsampling strategy for compressing mosaic videos with arbitrary RGB color filter arrays in H.264/AVC

• Innovatively modify the Y luma components when performing the subsampling.
• Our proposed subsampling strategy can resolve the RGB color deviation problem.
• Our proposed subsampling strategy can achieve better reconstructed video quality.

This work proposes an improved version of Yang et al.’s universal subsampling strategy for compressing mosaic videos with arbitrary red–green–blue (RGB) color filter arrays in H.264/AVC. For the subsampled images with 4:2:0 format, Yang et al.’s work retains the original Y luma component, but samples the proper U and V chroma components according to the corresponding mosaic structure for better reconstructing R and B pixels. However, Yang et al.’s strategy suffers from the RGB color deviations due to the U and V chroma subsampling, which results in the quality degradation of the reconstructed mosaic videos. We propose a novel modification for the Y luma component instead of only retaining the Y luma component such that the RGB color deviation problem can be resolved. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed improved universal subsampling strategy delivers better quality of the reconstructed mosaic and full-color videos, when compared with Yang et al.’s one.