Video streaming

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Advanced solutions for quality-oriented multimedia broadcasting

Multimedia content is increasingly being delivered via different types of networks to viewers in a variety of locations and contexts using a variety of devices. The ubiquitous nature of multimedia services comes at a cost, however. The successful delivery of multimedia services will require overcoming numerous technological challenges many of which have a direct effect on the quality of the multimedia experience. For example, due to dynamically changing requirements and networking conditions, the delivery of multimedia content has traditionally adopted a best effort approach. However, this approach has often led to the end-user perceived quality of multimedia-based services being negatively affected. Yet the quality of multimedia content is a vital issue for the continued acceptance and proliferation of these services. Indeed, end-users are becoming increasingly quality-aware in their expectations of multimedia experience and demand an ever-widening spectrum of rich multimedia-based services. As a consequence, there is a continuous and extensive research effort, by both industry and academia, to find solutions for improving the quality of multimedia content delivered to the users; as well, international standards bodies, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), are renewing their effort on the standardization of multimedia technologies. There are very different directions in which research has attempted to find solutions in order to improve the quality of the rich media content delivered over various network types. It is in this context that this special issue on broadcast multimedia quality of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting illustrates some of these avenues and presents some of the most significant research results obtained by various teams of researchers from many countries. This special issue provides an example, albeit inevitably limited, of the richness and breath of the current research on multimedia broadcasting services. The research i- - ssues addressed in this special issue include, among others, factors that influence user perceived quality, encoding-related quality assessment and control, transmission and coverage-based solutions and objective quality measurements

Understanding user experience of mobile video: Framework, measurement, and optimization

Since users have become the focus of product/service design in last decade, the term User eXperience (UX) has been frequently used in the field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). Research on UX facilitates a better understanding of the various aspects of the user’s interaction with the product or service. Mobile video, as a new and promising service and research field, has attracted great attention. Due to the significance of UX in the success of mobile video (Jordan, 2002), many researchers have centered on this area, examining users’ expectations, motivations, requirements, and usage context. As a result, many influencing factors have been explored (Buchinger, Kriglstein, Brandt & Hlavacs, 2011; Buchinger, Kriglstein & Hlavacs, 2009). However, a general framework for specific mobile video service is lacking for structuring such a great number of factors. To measure user experience of multimedia services such as mobile video, quality of experience (QoE) has recently become a prominent concept. In contrast to the traditionally used concept quality of service (QoS), QoE not only involves objectively measuring the delivered service but also takes into account user’s needs and desires when using the service, emphasizing the user’s overall acceptability on the service. Many QoE metrics are able to estimate the user perceived quality or acceptability of mobile video, but may be not enough accurate for the overall UX prediction due to the complexity of UX. Only a few frameworks of QoE have addressed more aspects of UX for mobile multimedia applications but need be transformed into practical measures. The challenge of optimizing UX remains adaptations to the resource constrains (e.g., network conditions, mobile device capabilities, and heterogeneous usage contexts) as well as meeting complicated user requirements (e.g., usage purposes and personal preferences). In this chapter, we investigate the existing important UX frameworks, compare their similarities and discuss some important features that fit in the mobile video service. Based on the previous research, we propose a simple UX framework for mobile video application by mapping a variety of influencing factors of UX upon a typical mobile video delivery system. Each component and its factors are explored with comprehensive literature reviews. The proposed framework may benefit in user-centred design of mobile video through taking a complete consideration of UX influences and in improvement of mobile videoservice quality by adjusting the values of certain factors to produce a positive user experience. It may also facilitate relative research in the way of locating important issues to study, clarifying research scopes, and setting up proper study procedures. We then review a great deal of research on UX measurement, including QoE metrics and QoE frameworks of mobile multimedia. Finally, we discuss how to achieve an optimal quality of user experience by focusing on the issues of various aspects of UX of mobile video. In the conclusion, we suggest some open issues for future study

Standardized toolchain and model development for video quality assessment: the mission of the joint effort group in VQEG

International audienceSince 1997, the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) has been active in the field of subjective and objective video quality assessment. The group has validated competitive quality metrics throughout several projects. Each of these projects requires mandatory actions such as creating a testplan and obtaining databases consisting of degraded video sequences with corresponding subjective quality ratings. Recently, VQEG started a new open initiative, the Joint Effort Group (JEG), for encouraging joint collaboration on all mandatory actions needed to validate video quality metrics. Within the JEG, effort is made to advance the field of both subjective and objective video quality measurement by providing proper software tools and subjective databases to the community. One of the subprojects of the JEG is the joint development of a hybrid H.264/AVC objective quality metric. In this paper, we introduce the JEG and provide an overview of the different ongoing activities within this newly started group

Bridge the Gap Between VQA and Human Behavior on Omnidirectional Video: A Large-Scale Dataset and a Deep Learning Model

Omnidirectional video enables spherical stimuli with the $360 \times 180^ \circ$ viewing range. Meanwhile, only the viewport region of omnidirectional video can be seen by the observer through head movement (HM), and an even smaller region within the viewport can be clearly perceived through eye movement (EM). Thus, the subjective quality of omnidirectional video may be correlated with HM and EM of human behavior. To fill in the gap between subjective quality and human behavior, this paper proposes a large-scale visual quality assessment (VQA) dataset of omnidirectional video, called VQA-OV, which collects 60 reference sequences and 540 impaired sequences. Our VQA-OV dataset provides not only the subjective quality scores of sequences but also the HM and EM data of subjects. By mining our dataset, we find that the subjective quality of omnidirectional video is indeed related to HM and EM. Hence, we develop a deep learning model, which embeds HM and EM, for objective VQA on omnidirectional video. Experimental results show that our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance of VQA on omnidirectional video.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 201