Multimedia Quality of Experience (QoE)

3 Review of Existing Objective QoE Methodologies

Yuming Fang¹, Weisi Lin¹ and Stefan Winkler²

¹Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

²Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC), Singapore

3.1 Overview

Quality evaluation for multimedia content is a basic and challenging problem in the field of multimedia processing, as well as various practical applications such as process evaluation, implementation, optimization, testing, and monitoring. Generally, the quality of multimedia content is affected by various factors such as acquisition, processing, compression, transmission, output interface, decoding, and other systems [1–3]. The perceived quality of impaired multimedia content depends on various factors: the individual interests, quality expectations, and viewing experiences of the user; output interface type and properties; and so on [2–5].

Since the Human Visual System (HVS) and the Human Auditory System (HAS) are the ultimate receiver and interpreter of the content, subjective measurement represents the most accurate method and thus serves as the benchmark for objective quality assessment [2–4]. Subjective experiments require a number of subjects to watch and/or listen to the test material and rate its quality. The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is used for the average rating over all subjects for each piece of multimedia content. A detailed discussion of subjective measurements can be found in Chapter 6. Although subjective experiments are accurate for the quality evaluation ...