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:
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 and
MPEG compression algorithms that produce
compression artifacts.
Quantization: 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, quantization is seen as
pixelation.