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Humans perceive flicker artifacts at 500 Hz

James Davis, Yi-Hsuan Hsieh, Hung-Chi Lee

2015 · Scientific Reports

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From the abstract

AbstractHumans perceive a stable average intensity image without flicker artifacts when a television or monitor updates at a sufficiently fast rate. This rate, known as the critical flicker fusion rate, has been studied for both spatially uniform lights and spatio-temporal displays. These studies have included both stabilized and unstablized retinal images and report the maximum observable rate as 50–90 Hz. A separate line of research has reported that fast eye movements known as saccades allow simple modulated LEDs to be observed at very high rates. Here we show that humans perceive visual flicker artifacts at rates over 500 Hz when a display includes high frequency spatial edges. This rate is many times higher than previously reported. As a result, modern display designs which use complex spatio-temporal coding need to update much faster than conventional TVs, which traditionally presented a simple sequence of natural images.

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jessriedel
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According to this, humans can't see flicker above 100 Hz for most smooth images, but if the image has high frequency spatial edges then they can see flicker up to 500-1000 Hz. It has to do with saccades. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07861
Original comment Polychromatic Pixels
Youden
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I don't think the claim that the human eye can't see more than 30fps was ever supported by evidence, it was just "common knowledge" like other falsehoods such as certain parts of the tongue only detecting certain tastes. I think it was actually based on the minimum frame rate necessary for a human to perceive motion instead of a slide show. Scientifically, a quick Google indicates that humans can see up to around 90Hz for more normal cases and 500Hz for a specific edge-case [0]. When it comes to video compression though, industry practice is largely based on the result of user testing. There are well-controlled tests where a bunch of people are put in a specific test…
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environment and shown videos encoded using different parameters and there are larger scale A/B tests where a streaming platform will tweak parameters and see how they affect metrics like time spent consuming content. So I'm confident that the compression of today matches the users and hardware of today. However hardware can change and I expect that's what will drive increases in video quality. For example the encodes of today are biases to some extent by the fact that people watch videos on tiny screens like phones or tablets, which are likely a bottleneck for quality perception. If people start consuming more content on say VR headsets, streaming platforms may see the need to increase quality. 8K is also a possible driver (especially for very large displays). Connectivity is also a big deal. Lossless music is possible because the bitrate is relatively low but streaming 4K blu-ray is out of the question for many people at the moment. In the future though it's definitely a possibility. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07861
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