Measurement of Flickering Artifact for H.264 with Periodic I-Frame Structure

Abstract

Most of multimedia video coding algorithms are lossy schemes and several kinds of spatial and temporal artifacts are inevitable. Flickering, which is the most typical coding artifact in time domain, is mainly due to fact that the quality of coded sequence fluctuates as the quantization parameter is adjusted for rate control. In this paper, we analyzed the effect of quality variation according to the characteristics of video sequence when the I-frames are periodically inserted. And we proposed the FR(Full Reference)-based assessment algorithm to measure the amount of flickering artifacts in the coded video. It is discovered that the flickering becomes critical when the level of quality is intermediate and is affected by the amount of detail or movement, the size of object, and camera parameters. The proposed measurement algorithm shows is well consistent with HVS(Human Visual System).