Perceptual statistics are used to compute importance maps that indicate which regions of a video frame are important to the human visual system. Importance maps may be generated from encoders that produce motion vectors and employ motion estimation for inter-prediction. The temporal contrast sensitivity function (TCSF) may be computed from the encoder's motion vectors. Quality metrics may be used to construct a true motion vector map (TMVM), which refines the TCSF. Spatial complexity maps (SCMs) can be calculated from simple metrics (e.g. block variance, block luminance, SSIM, and edge detection). Importance maps with TCSF, TMVM, and SCM may be used to modify the standard rate-distortion optimization criterion for selecting the optimum encoding solution. Importance maps may modify encoder quantization. The spatial information for the importance maps may be provided by a lookup table based on block variance, where negative and positive spatial QP offsets for block variances are provided.