Banding Prevention for AVM Video Codec

This paper discusses sources of banding artifacts present in video codecs using an example of the AVM video codec and proposes solutions that help to significantly reduce these artifacts. The proposed approach shows a reduction of banding observed by visual inspection and a decrease in banding according to an objective banding metric. The approach does not add new tools to the video codec. There is a penalty of 1.32% in the PSNR-YUV BD-rate observed on a range of test sequences. The proposed solutions can also be applied to other hybrid video codecs.