Detectability and annoyance of synthetic blockiness, blurriness, noisiness, and ringing in video sequences

Synthetic artifacts offer many advantages for experimental research on video quality because of the degree of control that the researchers have with respect to the amplitude, distribution, and mixture of artifacts. We have developed algorithms for synthetically generating four types of artifacts commonly found in digital videos: blockiness, blurriness, noisiness, and ringing. In this paper, we inserted these artifacts in short video sequences and performed a psychophysical experiment where we measured the probability of detection and the mean annoyance values of these artifacts as a function of their total squared error (TSE). The results show that, although the different artifacts looked different and affected the videos differently, there is no consistent difference between either their visibility thresholds or mid-annoyance TSE. Mid-annoyance values are positively correlated with the visibility threshold, and the relation can be described by a linear function.