A distortion that appears near crisp edges of objects in MPEG and other video frames that are compressed with the discrete cosine transform (DCT). It occurs at decompression when the decoding engine has to approximate the discarded data by inverting the transform model. The mosquito noise appears as random aliasing in these areas and requires sophisticated detection circuits to eliminate it. As TVs get larger, mosquito noise and other artifacts become more noticeable. See artifact. See also Mosquitotone.