A strength of the artifact per block is determined as is an overall dark noise artifact strength for each picture.

The present invention involves detecting dark noise artifacts in coded images and video.

The output signal of the APD is amplified and passed through a discriminator so as to reject at least one or more of amplifier noise and dark noise.

Physically, this is determined by the saturation capacity of each pixel, the dark current or dark noise, the ADC circuits, and gain settings.

Applying the anti-blooming voltage only during the short pulses decreases the dark noise induced by quantum tunnelling by the electrical field between the gate and photodiode.

A final artifact parameter for each picture can be assessed based on the total number of blocks that are classified as dark noise and also the strength of each macroblock.