Quality-of-experience prediction for streaming video

Abstract

With the rapid growth of streaming media applications, there has been a strong demand of objective models that can predict end users' quality-of-experience (QoE) when watching the video being streamed to their display devices. Existing methods typically use bitrate and global statistics of stalling events as the QoE indicators. This is problematic for two reasons. First, using the same bitrate to encode different video content could result in drastically different presentation QoE. Second, the interactions between presentation visual quality and playback stalling are not accounted for. Here we propose a novel QoE prediction approach that takes into consideration the instantaneous quality degradation due to perceptual video presentation impairment, the playback stalling events caused by imperfect network delivery, and the instantaneous interactions between presentation quality and playback stalling. The proposed algorithm demonstrates strong promise when tested using a subject-rated video streaming QoE database.