Chroma Subsampling in NumPy

Chroma subsampling is a method for reducing chrominance value in order to improve the transfer speed for TV broadcasting. This cool transformation depends on the fact that our eyes are more suspectible to changes in lighting intensity than variations in colour. Five major chroma subsampling methods can be observed in the image above with 4:2:2 being the most common one.

Let us implement array transformations for each of these schemas using Python’s NumPy.

Implementation

Results

Results for 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:1:0

Result for 4:1:1 from a different run: