COLOR MOTION ARTIFACT DETECTION AND PROCESSING APPARATUS COMPATIBLE WITH VIDEO CODING STANDARDS

To detect color motion artifacts in a video frame, a motion-compensated color-distance value is compared against a threshold value. If the motion-compensated color-distance value is greater than or equal to the threshold value, color-motion artifacts are detected. The motion-compensated color-distance value is a sum of absolute values of the differences between corresponding pixel values of the video frame and a reference frame. To detect color motion artifacts in a video frame, in another embodiment, luminance and chrominance components of the intra-frame activity levels are compared against luminance and chrominance components of the inter-frame activity levels. If any of the components of the inter-frame activity levels is greater than the corresponding components of the intra-frame activity levels, color-motion artifacts are detected. To reduce color-motion artifacts, either a smaller quantization scale or intra-frame encoding is used to encode the data.