Sarnoff’s Just Noticeable Difference (JND) technology stems from our proprietary computational model of the human visual system. Based on established physiological and psychophysical principles of visual discrimination, the technology determines whether a viewer is likely to see the effects of various processing on an image or video sequence.
JND technology is based on a video quality metric that both simplifies subjective quality measurement and makes it more reliable. Compression processes, such as MPEG-2, may introduce coding artifacts. JND technology is able to quantify visual differences between two images or video sequences just as the human eye would.
JND technology has been applied to a broad range of applications, including video test and measurement, video encoding, and medical imaging. Medical imaging requires maximum visual discrimination for image- or video-based diagnostic tasks. Alternatively, video compression benefits from low visibility of coding artifacts for a given bit rate. JND is also used for printing and display optimization — it evaluates the perceptual consequences of display system design choices and provides quality control.
