A Comparative Analysis of Image Scaling Algorithms

Image scaling, fundamental task of numerous image processing and computer vision applications, is the process of resizing an image by pixel interpolation. Image scaling leads to a number of undesirable image artifacts such as aliasing, blurring and moiré. However, with an increase in the number of pixels considered for interpolation, the image quality improves. This poses a quality-time trade off in which high quality output must often be compromised in the interest of computation complexity. This paper presents a comprehensive study and comparison of different image scaling algorithms. The performance of the scaling algorithms has been reviewed on the basis of number of computations involved and image quality. The search table modification to the bicubic image scaling algorithm greatly reduces the computational load by avoiding massive cubic and floating point operations without significantly losing image quality.