Evaluating the Effect of Compression on Video Temporal Consistency Using Objective Quality Metrics

TL;DR

This study investigates how video compression affects temporal consistency, revealing non-linear degradation and a predictability anomaly where unpredictable motion causes more instability.

Contribution

It provides a systematic analysis of temporal coherence errors across codecs and content, highlighting the importance of temporal-aware metrics in compression.

Findings

Temporal consistency degrades non-linearly with compression.

Unpredictable motion sequences exhibit higher instability.

Motion volume alone does not determine encoding difficulty.

Abstract

While video compression algorithms effectively reduce bitrate, aggressive quantization often compromises temporal coherence, introducing artifacts such as flicker, motion inconsistency, and unstable textures. Although spatial quality degradation is well-documented, the relationship between compression intensity and temporal stability remains insufficiently characterized. This paper systematically examines the progression of frame-to-frame coherence errors across different bitrate regimes, utilizing multiple codecs (AV1, HEVC, VP9, H.264) and content types. Our findings reveal that temporal consistency degrades non-linearly with increasing compression. Most critically, we identify a "Predictability anomaly" where sequences with unpredictable or irregular dynamics experience disproportionately higher instability than sequences with higher, but more predictable, motion magnitude. This challenges the conventional assumption that motion volume alone dictates encoding difficulty and highlights the necessity of temporal-aware metrics in compression pipelines.