On the effectiveness of natural videos in masking dynamic DCT noise
A fundamental understanding of what makes distortions harder to detect in videos can benefit efforts in video processing. We present the results of a study which extends the work of Watson et al. [J. Electronic Imaging, 2001], to investigate masking of dynamic DCT distortions by eight natural videos. Distortions ranged from 0-60 Hz in temporal frequency and from 2-22.6 c/deg in spatial frequency. Our results revealed that detection thresholds are jointly influenced by the spatiotemporal characteristics of the distortion and by the spatiotemporal characteristics of the video. We discuss the implications of these results for video coding and quality assessment.