Mosquito noise in MPEG-compressed video: test patterns and metrics

Charles P. Fenimore; John M. Libert; Peter Roitman

doi:10.1117/12.387203

2 June 2000 Mosquito noise in MPEG-compressed video: test patterns and metrics

Charles P. Fenimore, John M. Libert, Peter Roitman

Proceedings Volume 3959, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging V; (2000) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.387203
Event: Electronic Imaging, 2000, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

Mosquito noise is a time dependent video compression impairment in which the high frequency spatial detail in video images having crisp edges is aliased intermittently. A new synthetic test pattern of moving spirals or circles is described which generates mosquito noise (MN) under Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) compression. The spiral pattern is one of several NIST-developed patterns designed to stress specific features of compression based on motion estimation and quantization. The 'Spirals' pattern has several spirals or circles superimposed on a uniform background. The frames are filtered to avoid interline flicker which may be confounded with MN. Motion of the spirals and changing luminance of the background can be included to reduce the correlation between successive frames. Unexpectedly, even a static pattern of spirals can induce mosquito noise due to the stochastic character of the encoder. We consider metrics which are specific to the impairment being measured. For mosquito noise, we examine two separable detectors: each consists of a temporal (frame-to-frame) computation applied to the output of a spatial impairment detector which is applied to each frame. The two spatial detectors are: FLATS, which detects level 8 X 8 pixel image blocks; and the root-mean-square (RMS) applied to the image differences between original and compressed frames. The test patterns are encoded at low bit rates. We examine the measured mosquito noise as a function of the Group-of-Pictures (GOP) pattern in the MPEG-2 encoding and find that the GOP structure defines the periodicities of the MN.

Citation Download Citation

Charles P. Fenimore, John M. Libert, and Peter Roitman "Mosquito noise in MPEG-compressed video: test patterns and metrics", Proc. SPIE 3959, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging V, (2 June 2000); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.387203

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available