Lumi masking (derived from
luminance), also known as psychovisual enhancements or adaptive quantization, is a technique used by
video compression software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
, which reduces quality in very bright or very dark areas of the picture, as quality loss in these areas is less likely to be visible.
The reduction in quality (and therefore
bit rate) in certain areas of the picture caused by using lumi masking allows more bits to be allocated to the rest of the video, thus improving overall quality. Lumi masking is not perfect, however, and in some cases the degradation in quality it causes is visible.
See also
*
Subjective video quality
Subjective video quality is video quality as experienced by humans. It is concerned with how video is perceived by a viewer (also called "observer" or "subject") and designates their opinion on a particular video sequence. It is related to the fiel ...
References
Video compression
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