User expectations are one of the main factors on providing satisfactory QoE for streaming service providers. Measuring acceptability and annoyance of video content, therefore, provide a valuable insight when measured under a given context. In this ongoing work, we measure video QoE in terms of acceptability and annoyance for the remaining data in a mobile data plan context.. We show that simple logos can be used during the experiment to prompt the context to subjects and the different context levels may impact the user expectations and consequently their satisfactions. Finally, we show that objective metrics can be used to determine the acceptability and annoyance thresholds for a given context.

User Generated Content (UGC) refers to media generated by users for end-consumers that represent most of the media exchange on social media. UGC is subject to acquisition and transmission limitations that disable access to the pristine, i.e., perfect source content. Evaluating their quality, especially with current pre- and post-processing algorithms or filters, is a major issue for most off-the-shelf full-reference quality metrics. We propose to conduct a benchmark on existing full-reference, non-reference, and aesthetic quality metrics for UGC with special effects. We aim to identify the challenges posed by both UGC and filtering. We then propose a new combination of metrics tailored to enhanced and filtered UGC, which reaches a trade-off between complexity and accuracy.

Outlier analysis and spammer detection recently gained momentum in order to reduce uncertainty of subjective ratings in image & video quality assessment tasks. The large proportion of unreliable ratings from online crowdsourcing experiments and the need for qualitative and quantitative large-scale studies in the deep-learning ecosystem played a role in this event. We study the effect that data cleaning has on trainable models predicting the visual quality for videos, and present results demonstrating when cleaning is necessary to reach higher efficiency. To this end, we present and analyze a benchmark on clean and noisy User Generated Content (UGC) large-scale datasets on which we re-trained models, followed by an empirical exploration of the constraint of data removal. Our results show that a dataset presenting between 7 and 30% of outliers benefits from cleaning before training.

The human eye cannot perceive small pixel changes in images or videos until a certain threshold of distortion. In the context of video compression, Just Noticeable Difference (JND) is the smallest distortion level from which the human eye can perceive the difference between reference video and the distorted/compressed one. Satisfied-User-Ratio (SUR) curve is the complementary cumulative distribution function of the individual JNDs of a viewer group. However, most of the previous works predict each point in SUR curve by using features both from source video and from compressed videos with assumption that the group-based JND annotations follow Gaussian distribution, which is neither practical nor accurate. In this work, we firstly compared various common functions for SUR curve modeling. Afterwards, we proposed a novel parameter-driven method to predict the video-wise SUR from video features. Besides, we compared the prediction results of source-only features based (SRC-based) models and source plus compressed videos features (SRC+PVS-based) models.

Just Noticeable Difference (JND) and Satisfied User Ratio (SUR) has been widely investigated for compressed image and video to use the least resources (e.g., storage and bandwidth) without damaging the Quality of Experience (QoE) for end users. However, the current JND subjective test methodologies are extremely time consuming due to the large range of encoding parameters. Besides, the state-of-the-arts SUR/JND prediction models get non-negligible prediction error due to the limited masking effect features. To this end, we first proposed a preprocessing method to reduce the JND subjective test time by using dynamic range of encoding parameters and collected a new Video-Wise JND (VW-JND) datasets for HD videos: HDVJND. Afterwards, based on the collected datasets, we proposed a SUR prediction framework by extracting 3 types of features 1) masking effect features; 2) bitstreams features; 3) content features. Feature selection is applied to extracted features before regression. Besides, we also compared the direct and indirect SUR value predictions methods. Experiment results shows that our proposed optimization can reduce 7.14% of the subjective experiment time compared to the widely used Robust Binary Search (RBS). Furthermore, the proposed SUR and JND prediction frameworks outperform the SOTA model in HD-VJND datasets.

Recent advances in Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have resulted in a wider availability of Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). However, it is still unclear if VR gaming offers a substantial added value to players. For this reason a comparison of gaming experiences on VR HMD to those on mobile and PC, two other popular gaming platforms, is performed by conducting a user study via two games available on all three platforms. We explore the QoE of gaming by investigating momentous dimensions using the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) questionnaire. The results show higher Presence and Autonomy obtained by using HMD when compared to the two other platforms. However, these factors alone did not improve the Overall Quality. To take advantage of the new technology, satisfaction of all psychological needs, especially Competency, must be assured.

Overcomplete transforms have received considerable attention over the past years. However, they often suffer from a complexity burden. In this paper, a low complexity approach is provided, where an orthonormal basis is complemented with a set of incomplete transforms: those incomplete transforms include a reduced number of basis vectors that allow a reduction on the coding complexity and ensure a certain level of sparsity. The solution has been implemented in the HEVC standard and compression gains of around 1% on average are reported while reducing the decoder complexity in about 5%.

This paper presents a novel multimodal dataset for the analysis of Quality of Experience(QoE) in emerging immersive multimedia technologies. In particular, the perceived Sense of Presence (SoP) induced by one-minute long video stimuli is explored with respect to content, quality, resolution, and sound reproduction and annotated with subjective scores. Furthermore, a complementary analysis of the acquired physiological signals, such as EEG, ECG, and respiration is carried out, aiming at an alternative evaluation of human experience while consuming immersive multimedia.