Banding artifact, or false contouring, is a common video compression impairment that tends to appear on large flat regions in encoded videos. These staircase-shaped color bands can be very noticeable in high-definition videos. Here we study this artifact, and propose a new distortion-specific no-reference video quality model for predicting banding artifacts, called the Blind BANding Detector (BBAND index). BBAND is inspired by human visual models. The proposed detector can generate a pixel-wise banding visibility map and output a banding severity score at both the frame and video levels. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art banding detection algorithms and delivers better consistency with subjective evaluations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2002.11891,
title = {BBAND Index: A No-Reference Banding Artifact Predictor},
author = {Zhengzhong Tu and Jessie Lin and Yilin Wang and Balu Adsumilli and Alan C. Bovik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.11891},
year = {2020}
}