A system and method for facilitating inhibiting banding in video data, in part by anticipating when banding may occur given certain encoder parameters. An example method includes receiving an input stream of video data; extracting feature information characterizing the stream of video data; using a feed-forward neural network to process the feature information to estimate when a particular block of the stream of video data will exhibit an artifact when encoded using certain Quantization Parameters (QPs); incorporating the indication into metadata associated with the stream of video data; and transferring the stream of video data and metadata to a video encoder. In a more specific embodiment, the feature information includes color information and texture information, and the neural network includes a feed-forward neural network that includes a classifier with a sigmoid activation function, and which has been trained using a cross-entropy cost function.