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

Testing the Pecking Order, Method-of-Payment, Financial Slack, and Misvaluation Hypotheses for Tender Offers: Evidence from Japan

In this paper, we investigated the affect of tender offer transactions in Japan from four perspectives. The first one is in regards to the Pecking Order Theory, and the second one concerns the Method-of-Payment Hypothesis. Both of these first two perspectives are related to manager payment method decisions, such as cash versus stocks. The third perspective is taken from the Financial Slack Hypothesis, which is very similar to the Free Cash Flow Hypothesis, and the last perspective takes into account the Misvaluation Hypothesis. These latter two perspectives are similarly related to the subsequent responses from investors that follow the announcements of tender offers. We found strong evidence supporting the Pecking Order Theory, because managers are deeply motivated to select cash payments when they have an extensive amount of financial slack, free cash flow, representative of cash or cash equivalent. Unfortunately, on the other hand, we could not find any empirical data to fully support the Method-of-Payment hypothesis which was originally introduced and supported empirically in the U.S. Evidence from our research for the Financial Slack or Free Cash Flow and Misvaluation hypotheses proved that investor reactions in Japan are similar to those in the U.S. A Japanese market with an increase in tender offer transactions contributes to the wealth of both acquiring and target firms, despite the stock market responding negatively to investments from acquiring firms with an extensive amount of financial slack or free cash flow. Furthermore, our B/P ratio conclusions reaffirm the propositions of Shleifer and Vishny (2003), while the V/P ratios support Dong, et al. (2006) who used the Residual Income Model

Effect of content characteristics on quality of experience of adaptive streaming

The growing popularity of adaptive streaming-based video delivery nowadays has raised the interest about the user's perception when experiencing quality adaptation. The impact of the video content characteristics on user's perceptual quality has already become evident. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of this factor on the quality of experience of adaptive streaming scenarios. Our results show that the perceptual quality of adaptation strategies applied on videos with high spatial and low temporal amount of activity is significantly lower compared to the other content types

Subjective quality assessment of error concealment strategies for 3DTV in the presence of asymmetric transmission errors

International audienceThe transmission of 3DTV sequences over packet based networks may result in degradations of the video quality due to packet loss. In the conventional 2D case, several different strategies are known for extrapolating the missing information and thus concealing the error. In 3D however, the residual error after concealment of one view might leads to binocular rivalry with the correctly received second view. In this paper, three simple alternatives are presented: frame freezing, a reduced playback speed, and displaying only a single view for both eyes, thus effectively switching to 2D presentation. In a subjective experiment the performance in terms of quality of experience of the three methods is evaluated for different packet loss scenarios. Error-free encoded videos at different bit rates have been included as anchor conditions. The subjective experiment method contains special precautions for measuring the Quality of Experience (QoE) for 3D content and also contains an indicator for visual discomfort. The results indicate that switching to 2D is currently the best choice but difficulties with visual discomfort should be expected even for this method

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

Subjective experiment dataset for joint development of hybrid video quality measurement algorithms

International audienceThe application area of an objective measurement algorithm for video quality is always limited by the scope of the video datasets that were used during its development and training. This is particularly true for measurements which rely solely on information available at the decoder side, for example hybrid models that analyze the bitstream and the decoded video. This paper proposes a framework which enables researchers to train, test and validate their algorithms on a large database of video sequences in such a way that the - often limited - scope of their development can be taken into consideration. A freely available video database for the development of hybrid models is described containing the network bitstreams, parsed information from these bitstreams for easy access, the decoded video sequences, and subjectively evaluated quality scores

3D video quality of experience - influence of scale and crosstalk

This paper gives an overview of three recent studies by the authors on the topic of 3D video Quality of Experience (QoE). Two of studies [1,2] investigated different psychological dimension that may be needed for describing 3D video QoE and the third the visibility and annoyance of crosstalk[3]. The results shows that the video quality scale could be sufficient for evaluating S3D video experience for coding and spatial resolution reduction distortions. It was also confirmed that with a more complex mixture of degradations more than one scale should be used to capture the QoE in these cases. The study found a linear relationship between the perceived crosstalk and the amount of crosstalk

A global customer experience management architecture

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. A. Cuadra-Sanchez, M. Cutanda-Rodriguez, I. Perez-Mateos, A. Aurelius, K. Brunnstrom, J. Laulajainen, M. Varela, and J. E. López de Vergara, "A global customer experience management architecture", in Future Network and Mobile Summit, 2012, 1-8The quality of experience (QoE) is one of the main research lines in ITC industry, which seeks to manage quality as perceived by users. This document analyzes and describes requirements of a QoE driven management system architecture, which has been designed in the Celtic IPNQSIS project. The architecture is grouped into different levels: Data acquisition level, Monitoring level and Control Level. Each level comprises a specific set of capacities, such as Data collector, or Traffic Monitor amongst others. The architecture described in this paper constitutes the guidelines of the IPNQSIS project in terms of a QoE ecosystem that will settle the basis of global customer experience management architecture.This work is carried out in the framework of the Celtic and EUREKA initiative IPNQSIS (IP Network Monitoring for Quality of Service Intelligent Support) and has been partially funded by CDTI under Spanish PRINCE (PRoducto INdustrial para la gestión de la Calidad de Experiencia) project, meanwhile the Swedish part of the project is co funded by VINNOVA and the work of Finnish partners has been partially funded by Tekes

Hybrid video quality prediction: reviewing video quality measurement for widening application scope

A tremendous number of objective video quality measurement algorithms have been developed during the last two decades. Most of them either measure a very limited aspect of the perceived video quality or they measure broad ranges of quality with limited prediction accuracy. This paper lists several perceptual artifacts that may be computationally measured in an isolated algorithm and some of the modeling approaches that have been proposed to predict the resulting quality from those algorithms. These algorithms usually have a very limited application scope but have been verified carefully. The paper continues with a review of some standardized and well-known video quality measurement algorithms that are meant for a wide range of applications, thus have a larger scope. Their individual artifacts prediction accuracy is usually lower but some of them were validated to perform sufficiently well for standardization. Several difficulties and shortcomings in developing a general purpose model with high prediction performance are identified such as a common objective quality scale or the behavior of individual indicators when confronted with stimuli that are out of their prediction scope. The paper concludes with a systematic framework approach to tackle the development of a hybrid video quality measurement in a joint research collaboration.Polish National Centre for Research and Development (NCRD) SP/I/1/77065/10, Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova