Impact of Packet Loss on the Perceived Video Quality

Recently, there is an increasing popularity of video streaming services over IP networks, e.g., IPTV, whose successes strongly depend on the video quality experienced by the end users. However, the QoE/QoSE (Quality of Experience/Quality of Service Experienced) of these services can be strongly degraded due to the packet losses during the video delivery. On the other side, to understand how packet loss impacts the video quality is essentially for the ISPs to optimize their network design and engineering. In this paper we present our experimental results for evaluating the MPEG-4 video quality in the presence of packet losses. Our results show that a single packet loss in an I-frame can already result in a video impairment and significantly degrade the video quality. We evaluate the impact of single packet loss with different frequencies as well as loss distances within a short period. We found that more than two times single-losses in a short period will lead the video quality to be unacceptable. We proposed a logistic function which can be used to well predict the degradation of the video perceptual quality with increased packet losses in I-frame. Furthermore, we also found that the loss distance can strongly influence the video perceived quality.