  Banding artifact, as known as staircase-like contour, is a common quality
annoyance that happens in compression, transmission, etc. scenarios, which
largely affects the user's quality of experience (QoE). The banding distortion
typically appears as relatively small pixel-wise variations in smooth
backgrounds, which is difficult to analyze in the spatial domain but easily
reflected in the frequency domain. In this paper, we thereby study the banding
artifact from the frequency aspect and propose a no-reference banding detection
model to capture and evaluate banding artifacts, called the Frequency-Sensitive
BANding Detector (FS-BAND). The proposed detector is able to generate a
pixel-wise banding map with a perception correlated quality score. Experimental
results show that the proposed FS-BAND method outperforms state-of-the-art
image quality assessment (IQA) approaches with higher accuracy in banding
classification task.
