Perception-based quantitative definition of temporal pumping artifact

Temporal noises or distortions, such as flickering, jerkiness, and mosquito noise, have been studied for many years in video coding, but a completely mathematical definition describing the perception characters of these temporal noises has not been investigated nor established. In this paper, a distinct type of temporal coding distortion, i.e., the temporal pumping artifact (TPA) is addressed, which manifests itself as visually annoying pumping and stumbling effects caused by applying inappropriate quantization parameter assignment in the state-of-the-art video coding standards with the hierarchical prediction structure. In this paper, the TPA is treated as a spatio-temporal signal and a detailed and comprehensive perception-based quantitative definition in terms of its phase, amplitude, and frequency, respectively is given for the fist time. It is both useful for understanding, or proposing algorithms to alleviate, or even eliminate the TPA and useful for the related studies for other temporal noises or distortions.