Banding vs. Quality: Perceptual Impact and Objective Assessment
This work addresses video quality assessment for processing and compression applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing metrics.
The paper tackled the problem of banding artifacts in video quality assessment by comparing their perceptual impact to scaling and compression artifacts, and proposed a banding-aware metric combining VMAF and CAMBI that showed improved correlation with perceived quality.
Staircase-like contours introduced to a video by quantization in flat areas, commonly known as banding, have been a long-standing problem in both video processing and quality assessment communities. The fact that even a relatively small change of the original pixel values can result in a strong impact on perceived quality makes banding especially difficult to be detected by objective quality metrics. In this paper, we study how banding annoyance compares to more commonly studied scaling and compression artifacts with respect to the overall perceptual quality. We further propose a simple combination of VMAF and the recently developed banding index, CAMBI, into a banding-aware video quality metric showing improved correlation with overall perceived quality.