
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 or a combination.
Information science
In information science, digital artifacts result from:
*Hardware malfunction: In computer graphics,
visual artifacts 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 overclocking. Common types of hardware artifacts are
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 censorship ...
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 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 compression algorithms that produce
compression artifacts.
*
Aliasing: 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.
*
Rolling shutter, the line scanning of an object that is moving too fast for the image sensor to capture a unitary image.
*
Error diffusion: 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