  Staircase-like contours introduced to a video by quantization in flat areas,
commonly known as banding, have been a long-standing problem in both video
processing and quality assessment communities. The fact that even a relatively
small change of the original pixel values can result in a strong impact on
perceived quality makes banding especially difficult to be detected by
objective quality metrics. In this paper, we study how banding annoyance
compares to more commonly studied scaling and compression artifacts with
respect to the overall perceptual quality. We further propose a simple
combination of VMAF and the recently developed banding index, CAMBI, into a
banding-aware video quality metric showing improved correlation with overall
perceived quality.
