On the visibility of flicker distortions in naturalistic videos

Motion can reduce the visibility of flicker distortions. We performed human subjective tests to investigate how motion influences the visibility of flicker distortions in naturalistic videos. Forty three naïve subjects participated in two tasks (“follow the moving object” and “view freely”) and reported their percepts on 36 test videos. Flicker distortions were simulated by periodic changes of video frames at different quality levels and flicker frequencies. An eye tracker was used to monitor each subject's gaze. The results indicate that the visibility of flicker distortions is strongly reduced when the speed of coherent motion is large, and the effect is more pronounced when the video quality is poor. We conjecture that sufficiently fast and coherent motions near the gaze point mask or `silence' the perception of flicker distortions in naturalistic videos in agreement with a recently observed `motion silencing' effect on synthetic stimuli.