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Blocking artefacts

Definition

Visible rectangular discontinuities at 8x8 block boundaries, caused by independent quantisation of adjacent blocks. At splice boundaries, misaligned block grids produce a detectable phase shift.

Related terms

DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform)
The mathematical transformation applied to each 8x8 pixel block during JPEG compression, converting spatial pixel values into a set of frequency coefficients...
Double-JPEG compression
The result of decoding a JPEG, applying any edit, and saving as JPEG again. The coefficient histograms of doubly-compressed images have a...
JPEG ghost
A localisation method that re-saves the image at multiple quality levels, then maps per-pixel residuals to find regions whose minimum error quality...
Quality factor
The 1-100 scale that most JPEG encoders expose to the user, controlling how aggressively the quantisation table rounds coefficients. The factor is...
Quantisation table
A matrix of divisors applied to DCT coefficients during JPEG compression. Higher divisors produce lower quality. The specific table used is often...

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