Workshops and tutorials ISCE and SI Symposiums 2012

About ten years ago, Quality of Experience (QoE) has been introduced as a concept that challenges the well-known Quality of Service (QoS) approach. Whereas QoS looks at the technical parameters of a network, service, device, or application to measure its performance, QoE looks beyond these parameters and includes the human user into the equation. It comes from the insight that ourperception of quality is influenced by technical, but also significantly by human and context-related factors. A simple example for this is that we can be equally satisfied with the overall quality of a movie we watch at the cinema, and a Youtube clip we watch on our mobile while travelling on the bus. However, the same clip at the same bitrate, watched on the TV in our living room, would probably fail our quality expectations. Although perceived quality / QoE is highly relevant for Consumer Electronics, it has not received a lot of attention (yet). In fact, many professionals still find it hard to exchange their QoS-based approaches and turn them into QoE-based ones. Reasons for this are manifold: whereas QoS management can rely on traditional, engineering-style measurements of parameters easily described by and quantified in numbers, QoE measurement involves a multi-disciplinary set of parameters that can be difficult to measure, that varies depending on a number of factors external to the actual device and that generally requires advanced methodologies of parameter estimation and analysis to be successfully applied. In this tutorial we will give an overview on QoE in the context of Consumer Electronics. We will define the term itself in more detail, we will look at relevant features and influence factors, and we will discuss traditional and novel techniques and methodologies for QoE measurement. Special focus will be put on human perception mechanisms (visual, auditory, and audiovisual perception), and how knowledge about such mechanisms can be used to model and design advanced objective metrics for QoE. The tutorial will provide interested attendants with a jump-start to the field of QoE, will discuss standard procedures and recommendations, and will give insight to latest developments and current hot topics in QoE research.