The Impact of Network Impairment on Quality of Experience (QoE) in H.265/HEVC Video Streaming
The Impact of Network Impairment on Quality of Experience (QoE) in H.265/HEVC Video Streaming
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DOI：
10.1109/tce.2014.6852000
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发表时间：
2014-05-01
影响因子：
4.3
通讯作者：
Goma, Sergio
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Nightingale, James;Wang, Qi;Goma, Sergio
现代便携式消费设备（智能手机、平板电脑等）的用户期望无处不在地提供高质量的服务，充分利用他们的设备的能力。视频流是运营商使用最广泛但最具挑战性的服务之一，以确保服务水平。这种挑战在带宽限制和分组丢失常见的无线网络中更加明显。高效率视频编码（HEVC）的较低带宽要求提供了使服务提供商能够在低带宽网络中递送高质量视频流的潜力;然而，分组丢失可能在给定较高压缩比的情况下导致感知质量的更大损害。这项工作考虑了HEVC编码视频流在受损网络环境中的传输，并从最终用户的角度量化了网络损伤对HEVC视频流的影响。HEVC编码的流通过测试网络进行传输，其中有线和无线段具有不完善的通信信道，容易发生分组丢失。采用两种不同的错误隐藏方法来减轻分组丢失并克服参考解码器鲁棒性问题。接收到的视频的感知质量由一组观众主观评估。HEVC质量的现有主观研究尚未考虑网络损伤的影响。结果的分析量化了HEVC中的分组丢失对感知质量的影响，并且提供了对观察到的影响HEVC流传输中的用户感知的主要因素的相对重要性的有价值的洞察。本研究的输出显示了影响受损HEVC编码视频流中人类感知质量的因素之间的相对重要性和关系。与常用的客观质量测量技术进行比较，支持主观分析。来自该工作的输出可以用于在易丢失网络中开发面向HEVC的体验质量（QoE）的流传输应用（1）。
Users of modern portable consumer devices (smartphones, tablets etc.) expect ubiquitous delivery of high quality services, which fully utilise the capabilities of their devices. Video streaming is one of the most widely used yet challenging services for operators to deliver with assured service levels. This challenge is more apparent in wireless networks where bandwidth constraints and packet loss are common. The lower bandwidth requirements of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) provide the potential to enable service providers to deliver high quality video streams in low-bandwidth networks; however, packet loss may result in greater damage in perceived quality given the higher compression ratio. This work considers the delivery of HEVC encoded video streams in impaired network environments and quantifies the effects of network impairment on HEVC video streaming from the perspective of the end user. HEVC encoded streams were transmitted over a test network with both wired and wireless segments that had imperfect communication channels subject to packet loss. Two different error concealment methods were employed to mitigate packet loss and overcome reference decoder robustness issues. The perceptual quality of received video was subjectively assessed by a panel of viewers. Existing subjective studies of HEVC quality have not considered the implications of network impairments. Analysis of results has quantified the effects of packet loss in HEVC on perceptual quality and provided valuable insight into the relative importance of the main factors observed to influence user perception in HEVC streaming. The outputs from this study show the relative importance and relationship between those factors that affect human perception of quality in impaired HEVC encoded video streams. The subjective analysis is supported by comparison with commonly used objective quality measurement techniques. Outputs from this work may be used in the development of quality of experience (QoE) oriented streaming applications for HEVC in loss prone networks(1).