IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing

We present a survey of psychophysiology-based assessment for quality of experience (QoE) in advanced multimedia technologies. We provide a classification of methods relevant to QoE and describe related psychological processes, experimental design considerations, and signal analysis techniques. We summarize multimodal techniques and discuss several important aspects of psychophysiology-based QoE as... View full abstract»

With the growing complexity of various text-to-speech systems, it is becoming more important to understand the underlying perceptual and judgement processes that drive user Quality-of-Experience (QoE) perception. Typical QoE assessment techniques, such as listening tests with self-report ratings, are useful but provide limited insight into these underlying processes. Recent advances in neuroimagin... View full abstract»

In the case of videos, the measurement of subjective detection of quality degradation usually needs observers to report the detection. However, if this detection could be automatically deduced by nonintrusive means, viewing would not be disturbed. This study examined how the subjective detection of quality degradation can be seen from eye movements, both in terms of group averages as well as from ... View full abstract»

Standardization bodies recommend various protocols to conduct subjective quality assessment (QA) of imaging systems. While many studies have compared these QA protocols, few have assessed the impact of different approaches for preprocessing and analyzing quality ratings. Furthermore, the effect of large versus small quality differences on the discrimination performance of protocols has not been ex... View full abstract»

The popularity of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging has grown in both academic and private research sectors. Since the native visualization of HDR content still has its limitations, the importance of dynamic range compression (i.e., tone-mapping) is very high. This paper evaluates observers' preference of experience in context of image tone-mapping. Given the different nature of natural and compute... View full abstract»

During the past decades, spatial reproduction of audio signals has evolved from simple two-channel stereo to surround sound (e.g., 5.1 or 7.1) and, more recently, to three-dimensional (3D) sound including height speakers, such as 9.1 or 22.2. With increasing number of speakers, increasing spatial fidelity and listener envelopment are expected. This paper reviews popular methods for subjective asse... View full abstract»

With widespread applications of three-dimensional (3-D) technology, measuring quality of experience for 3-D multimedia content plays an increasingly important role. In this paper, we propose a full reference stereo image quality assessment (SIQA) framework which focuses on the innovation of binocular visual properties and applications of low-level features. On one hand, based on the fact that huma... View full abstract»

Stereoscopic imaging is becoming increasingly popular. However, to ensure the best quality of experience, there is a need to develop more robust and accurate objective metrics for stereoscopic content quality assessment. Existing stereoscopic image and video metrics are either extensions of conventional 2-D metrics (with added depth or disparity information) or are based on relatively simple perce... View full abstract»

Super MultiView (SMV) video display is the most promising technology for 3-D glasses-free visualization. Although only a few prototypes are currently available, the research on technical and perceptual factors related to this approach is crucial. This paper presents a novel model to capture the subjective perception of SMV, called the MultiView Perceptual Disparity Model (MVPDM), by means of a par... View full abstract»

This paper reports on the result of a user study to assess the impact of resolution and frame rate of video on the quality of experience of the users, when the video is rendered inside a 3-D virtual space, and consequently viewed from arbitrary perspectives. A mathematical model for video rate is presented that expresses the total rate as the product of separate functions of spatial and temporal r... View full abstract»

As video-streaming services for mobile terminals are becoming more popular, the volume of mobile traffic is growing rapidly. To deliver traffic-heavy network services without degrading users' overall experience, one must examine service characteristics and end-to-end network conditions. In this paper, we propose “QUVE,” a framework for maximizing the user's quality of experience (QoE) of video str... View full abstract»

With the rapid growth of streaming media applications, there has been a strong demand of quality-of-experience (QoE) measurement and QoE-driven video delivery technologies. Most existing methods rely on bitrate and global statistics of stalling events for QoE prediction. This is problematic for two reasons. First, using the same bitrate to encode different video content results in drastically diff... View full abstract»

Rate control plays an important role in any video coding application and it was extensively studied in the context of previous video coding standards. However, the current state-of the-art high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard introduces many flexible tools making previous rate-distortion models used in rate control insufficiently accurate. Recently, a few rate control methods have been dev... View full abstract»

The continuing growth in the mobile phone arena, particularly in terms of device capabilities and ownership, is having a transformational impact on media consumption. It is now possible to consider orchestrated multistream experiences delivered across many devices, rather than the playback of content from a single device. However, there are significant challenges in realizing such a vision, partic... View full abstract»

After an image or video is acquired, it is subjected to a number of signal processing algorithms, such as editing, enhancement, compression, scaling, transmission, and rendering, all of which can alter the perceptual quality. Visual quality assessment (VQA) aims to find an estimate of the impact of such alterations to be used, e.g., during algorithm/system design, optimization and comparisons (whi... View full abstract»

In general, owing to the benefits obtained from original information, full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) achieves relatively higher prediction accuracy than no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). By fully utilizing reference images, conventional FR-IQA methods have been investigated to produce objective scores that are close to subjective scores. In contrast, NR-IQA does not... View full abstract»