QoE-aware video resolution thresholds computation for adaptive multimedia

Multimedia streaming to mobile devices is one of the main sources of network congestion. As bandwidth requirements are continually increasing and users are becoming more quality-aware, there is a growing need for QoE-aware multimedia adaptation solutions. This paper presents a novel mechanism named ResCompute, which enables to automatically compute threshold values up to which the video resolution can be decreased while still maintaining a predefined QoE level. The mechanism combines full-reference objective VQA metrics and rules for mapping their values to the subjective MOS scale. The results from a subjective study with 60 participants show that mapping rules for full-reference VQA metrics such as PSNR, SSIM and VIFp provide up to 72.22% MOS level match accuracy across different categories of multimedia clips. Moreover, accurate resolution threshold values computation requires careful selection of the VQA metrics mapping rules to balance the under and overestimation of subjective video quality.