Lumi masking

Lumi masking is a technique used by video compression software, which reduces quality in very bright or very dark areas of the picture, as quality loss in these areas is less likely to be visible. It is also known as "psychovisual enhancements" or "adaptive quantization". The reduction in quality (and therefore bitrate) in certain areas of the picture caused by using lumi masking allows more bits to be allocated to the rest of the video, thus improving overall quality. Lumi masking is not perfect, however, and in some cases the degradation in quality it causes is visible.

The term is derived from luminance.