Chapter 4 - Emerging science of QoE in multimedia applications: Concepts, experimental guidelines, and validation of models

Abstract

This chapter is related to the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE) in multimedia applications. Throughout the chapter, QoE mostly has to be considered in such applied context, even if the term multimedia is not always mentioned. After reminding the concept of QoE, the chapter provides guidelines on: (1) how to design, conduct, and interpret QoE experiments with humans and (2) how to use the results obtained from such experiments for evaluating the performance of objective QoE estimators. The main factors influencing QoE are first summarized and the possibilities of involving particular aspects of QoE into the subjective tests are discussed. The most popular subjective procedures are introduced in detail, together with their advantages and weaknesses. Thorough instructions regarding processing the outcomes of the particular procedures are provided, as well as advanced methodologies for determining the significance of influence of the specific dimensions on the measured overall QoE. Finally, the possibilities of utilizing subjective data for evaluating the performance of objective QoE estimators are introduced in detail. Such methods are useful for comparison, training, and validation of the estimators.