Colonel Crawford Burn Site Monument drawing

Digital artifact in information science, is any undesired or unintended alteration in data introduced in a digital process by an involved technique and/or technology. Digital artifact can be of any content types including text, audio, video, image,

animation Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...

or a combination.

Information science

In information science, digital artifacts result from: *Hardware malfunction: In computer graphics,

visual artifact Visual artifacts (also artefacts) are anomalies apparent during visual representation as in digital graphics and other forms of imagery, especially photography and microscopy. In digital graphics * Image quality factors, different types of v ...

s may be generated whenever a hardware component such as the processor, memory chip, cabling malfunctions, etc., corrupts data. Examples of malfunctions include physical damage, overheating, insufficient voltage and

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mo ...

overclocking In computing, overclocking is the practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. Commonly, operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component's operational stability at accelerated spe ...

. Common types of hardware artifacts are

texture Texture may refer to: Science and technology * Surface texture, the texture means smoothness, roughness, or bumpiness of the surface of an object * Texture (roads), road surface characteristics with waves shorter than road roughness * Texture ( ...

corruption and T-vertices in 3D graphics, and

pixelization Pixelization (British English, pixelisation) or mosaic processing is any technique used in editing images or video, whereby an image is blurred by displaying part or all of it at a markedly lower resolution. It is primarily used for censorshi ...

in MPEG compressed video. *Software malfunction: Artifacts may be caused by algorithm flaws such as decoding/encoding audio or video, or a poor pseudo-random number generator that would introduce artifacts distinguishable from the desired noise into statistical models. * Compression: Controlled amounts of unwanted information may be generated as a result of the use of

lossy compression In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...

techniques. One example is the artifacts seen in

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and im ...

and

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and ...

compression algorithms that produce

compression artifacts A compression artifact (or artefact) is a noticeable distortion of media (including images, audio, and video) caused by the application of lossy compression. Lossy data compression involves discarding some of the media's data so that it bec ...

. *

Aliasing In signal processing and related disciplines, aliasing is an effect that causes different signals to become indistinguishable (or ''aliases'' of one another) when sampled. It also often refers to the distortion or artifact that results when a ...

: Digital imprecision generated in the process of converting analog information into digital space, is due to the limited granularity of digital numbering space. In computer graphics, aliasing is seen as

pixelation In computer graphics, pixelation (or pixellation in British English) is caused by displaying a bitmap or a section of a bitmap at such a large size that individual pixels, small single-colored square display elements that comprise the bitmap, ...

. * Rolling shutter, the line scanning of an object that is moving too fast for the image sensor to capture a unitary image. *

Error diffusion Error diffusion is a type of halftoning in which the quantization residual is distributed to neighboring pixels that have not yet been processed. Its main use is to convert a multi-level image into a binary image, though it has other applications. ...

: poorly-weighted kernel coefficients result in undesirable visual artifacts.

References

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External links

DPReview: Glossary: Artifacts
Anthropology Archaeology Information science Error Computer graphic artifacts Digital photography