Is there a way to perform 2D convolutions with strides using Accelerate library in Swift? - arrays

Question

I am trying to perform a specific downsampling process. It is described by the following pseudocode.
//Let V be an input image with dimension of M by N (row by column)
//Let U be the destination image of size floor((M+1)/2) by floor((N+1)/2)
//The floor function is to emphasize the rounding for the even dimensions
//U and V are part of a wrapper class of Pixel_FFFF vImageBuffer
for i in 0 ..< U.size.rows {
for j in 0 ..< U.size.columns {
U[i,j] = V[(i * 2), (j * 2)]
}
}
The process basically takes pixel values on every other locations spanning on both dimensions. The resulting image will be approximately half of the original image.
On a one-time call, the process is relatively fast running by itself. However, it becomes a bottleneck when the code is called numerous times inside a bigger algorithm. Therefore, I am trying to optimize it. Since I use Accelerate in my app, I would like to be able to adapt this process in a similar spirit.
Attempts
First, this process can be easily done by a 2D convolution using the 1x1 kernel [1] with a stride [2,2]. Hence, I considered the function vImageConvolve_ARGBFFFF. However, I couldn't find a way to specify the stride. This function would be the best solution, since it takes care of the image Pixel_FFFF structure.
Second, I notice that this is merely transferring data from one array to another array. So, I thought vDSP_vgathr function is a good solution for this. However, I hit a wall, since the resulting vector of vectorizing a vImageBuffer would be the interleaving bits structure A,R,G,B,A,R,G,B,..., which each term is 4 bytes. vDSP_vgathr function transfers every 4 bytes to the destination array using a specified indexing vector. I could use a linear indexing formula to make such vector. But, considering both even and odd dimensions, generating the indexing vector would be as inefficient as the original solution. It would require loops.
Also, neither of the vDSP 2D convolution functions fit the solution.
Is there any other functions in Accelerate that I might have overlooked? I saw that there's a stride option in the vDSP 1D convolution functions. Maybe, does someone know an efficient way to translate 2D convolution process with strides to 1D convolution process?