Perceptual contributions of blocky, blurry and noisy artifacts to overall annoyance

In this paper, we create synthetic artifacts that are perceived to be predominantly blocky, blurry or noisy. We present them alone or in various combinations and have subjects rate the perceived strength of each artifact and the overall annoyance of the combined artifacts. We found that a simple linear model with no interactions predicted how the perceived artifacts combine to determine overall annoyance. The estimated coefficients indicate that, when the artifacts are equated in perceived strength, blurriness contributes the most to annoyance followed by noise and then blockiness, although the relative weights of blockiness and noise vary with the video content.