WATERLOO, Ontario, Canada – SSIMWAVE, the leader in Viewer Experience QC and Automation, today announced that it has been awarded a patent for image and video banding detection.

U.S. Patent No. No.63/008, 257, "Image and Video Banding Assessment," is intended to help live and VOD streaming services detect and eradicate one of the most difficult-to-solve video quality impairments in OTT streams. The solution is already deployed in production by some of the top streaming platforms to optimize for Banding across billions of hours of viewed content.

The patent describes the method by which the SSIMPLUS® products and metric address banding effects in an image or video, including:

Banding is a common compression impairment that usually appears in smooth regions within encoded videos. All popular codecs, such as H.264/AVC, VP9, H.265/HEVC, and AV1 can introduce banding. Content-aware encoding approaches typically introduce more banding as content regions that are prone to banding are generally deemed low complexity by such encoders and are compressed even more than traditional approaches, resulting in even more banding. The impairment is noticeable in both SDR and HDR content, especially on high-resolution displays.

Read the full announcement here.

Ssimwave