Quality of Experience Engineering for Customer Added Value Services: From Evaluation to Monitoring

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Estimating the Effect of Context on the QoE of Audiovisual Services

Toni MáKI, Martín VARELA and Jukka-Pekka LAULAJAINEN

Multimedia service providers and operators need tools that can estimate the quality of the services delivered to their end-customers. To this end, a variety of quality prediction models have been developed. The models are typically built and trained based on data acquired from user studies conducted in laboratories with precisely defined conditions. While laboratory originated data is accurate and reliable, the performance of Quality of Experience (QoE) models could possibly be further improved by taking into account the real context of use. Working toward that goal, in this chapter, we compare results of a laboratory audiovisual quality subjective study and two smaller scale user studies conducted in a public place. We also discuss our approach of enhancing the prediction accuracy with context-specific bias functions.

4.1 Introduction

Multimedia services offered through Internet protocol (IP) networks, such as Internet protocol television (IPTV), have gained popularity and increased competition between service providers. In order to keep customers satisfied, service providers and operators need to take care that the quality of their video streaming is good enough for their users. In quality management it is crucial to monitor the realized QoE of services delivered to customers. To this end, many so-called objective quality models - that is, those which can ...