Image quality of 4∶2∶2 and 4∶2∶0 chroma subsampling formats

There is a large number of different video compression formats being used for various purposes today. These formats differ between each other in possibility of achieving suitable bitrates while maintaining acceptable image quality. Current video compression standards offers the possibility of different sampling rate for the luminant and the chrominant components of video signal. Because HVS is much more sensitive to changes in luminance than changes in chrominance of an image, compression can be achieved by subsampling the chroma components. This paper presents the measurement of the influence of two different chroma subsampling formats (4:2:2 and 4:2:0) on image quality after MPEG-2 compression. The obtained results show that 4:2:0 subsampling format gives slightly better results for bitrates up to 15 Mbit/s.