Video coding systems and methods are provided that protect against various artifacts (e.g., banding artifacts) in decoded frame content. The embodiments to protect against introducing artifacts include pre-processing the input video frame, controlling the encoding parameters and/or post-processing the decoded video frame. A method for encoding a frame may include calculating a dark-scene score for the frame based on measured statistics of the frame. The dark-scene score may be compared to a threshold to determine if the banding artifacts may be present in the frame. Based on the comparison, filtering parameters for the frame may be altered to reduce the amount of noise filtered from the frame. The frame may be filtered based on the altered filtering parameters and encoded.