A Continuous QoE Evaluation Framework for Video Streaming Over HTTP

A continuous evaluation of the end user's quality-of-experience (QoE) is essential for efficient video streaming. This is crucial for networks with constrained resources that offer time-varying channel quality to its users. In hypertext transfer protocol-based video streaming, the QoE is measured by quantifying the perceptual impact of distortions caused by rate adaptation or interruptions in playback due to rebuffering events. The resulting impact on the QoE due to these distortions has been studied individually in the literature. However, the QoE is determined by an interplay of these distortions, and therefore necessitates a combined study of them. To the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly available database that studies these distortions jointly on a continuous time basis. In this paper, our contributions are twofold. First, we present a database consisting of videos at full high definition and ultrahigh definition resolutions. We consider various levels of rate adaptation and rebuffering distortions together in these videos as experienced in a typical realistic setting. A subjective evaluation of these videos is conducted on a continuous time scale. Second, we present a QoE evaluation framework comprising a learning-based model during playback and an exponential model during rebuffering. Furthermore, we perform an objective evaluation of popular video quality assessment and continuous time QoE metrics over the constructed database. The objective evaluation study demonstrates that the performance of the proposed QoE model is superior to that of the objective metrics. The database is publicly available for download at http://www.iith.ac.in/~lfovia/downloads.html.