Towards a fair comparison of the coding efficiency of interlaced and progressive video

Although in the literature comparisons of the effectiveness of MPEG-2 coding on interlaced and progressive sources have been reported, we think some very important aspects are missing in the research so far. Particularly, the differences in resulting blocking artifacts are neglected, while usually only scenes with abundant vertical detail are evaluated. From our experiments, we conclude that the general opinion concerning the effectiveness of MPEG-2 coding on interlaced picture material is likely biassed by the focus on challenging sequences only, while the omission of blockiness metrics in the evaluation significantly increases this bias further.