Lagrange-Chebyshev Interpolation for image resizing

Abstract

Image resizing is a basic tool in image processing and in literature we have many methods, based on different approaches, which are often specialized in only upscaling or downscaling. In this paper, independently of the (reduced or enhanced) size we aim to get, we approach the problem at a continuous scale where the underlying continuous image is globally approximated by the tensor product Lagrange polynomial interpolating at a suitable grid of first kind Chebyshev zeros. This is a well-known approximation tool that is widely used in many applicative fields, due to the optimal behavior of the related Lebesgue constants. Here we show how Lagrange-Chebyshev interpolation can be fruitfully applied also for resizing an arbitrary digital image in both downscaling and upscaling. The performance of the proposed method has been tested in terms of the standard SSIM and PSNR metrics. The results indicate that, in upscaling, it is almost comparable with the classical Bicubic resizing method with slightly better metrics, but in downscaling a much higher performance has been observed in comparison with Bicubic and other recent methods too. Moreover, in downscaling cases with an odd scale factor, we give an estimate of the mean squared error produced by our method and prove it is theoretically null (hence PSNR equals to infinite and SSIM equals to one) in absence of noise or initial artifacts on the input image.