A Masking Model for Motion Sharpening Phenomenon in Video Sequences

Abstract

In this paper, we show that motion sharpening phenomenon can be explained as a form of visual masking for a special case where a video sequence is composed of alternate frames with different level of sharpness. A frame of higher sharpness behaves to mask the ambiguity of a subsequent frame of lower sharpness and hence preserves the perceptive quality of the whole sequence. Borrowing the mechanism for visual masking, we formulated a quantitative model for deriving the minimum spatial frequency conditions which preserves the subjective quality of the frames being masked. The quantitative model takes into account three fundamental properties of the video signals, namely the size of motion, average luminance and the power of each frequency components. The psychophysical responses towards the changes of these properties are obtained through subjective assessment tests using video sequences of simple geometrical patterns. Subjective experiments on natural video sequences show that more than 75% of viewers could make no distinction between the original sequence and the one processed using the quantitative model.