A perceptual visibility metric for banding artifacts

Abstract

Banding is a common video artifact caused by compressing low texture regions with coarse quantization. Relatively few previous attempts exist to address banding and none incorporate subjective testing for calibrating the measurement. In this paper, we propose a novel metric that incorporates both edge length and contrast across the edge to measure video banding. We further introduce both reference and non-reference metrics. Our results demonstrate that the new metrics have a very high correlation with subjective assessment and certainly outperforms PSNR, SSIM, and VQM.