Perceptually weighted distortion measure in low bitrate block-based video coders

Visual artifacts found in videos compressed at low bitrates may be the results of various decisions made in the encoding process. Although many post-processing techniques are available to detect and reduce such artifacts, they often lead to undesired blurriness and require extensive computations. A better approach is to avoid such artifacts in the first place by making better decisions in the encoding process. In this paper, a perceptually weighted distortion (PWD) measure is presented. This distortion measure, which outperforms the conventional distortion measures in terms of subjective quality, leads to an acceptable increase in computational complexity.