Network latencies and losses in fast online interactive multimedia applications may lead to a degraded perception of quality, such as lower interactivity or sluggish responses. These degradations in perceptual quality can be measured by the just-noticeable difference, awareness, or probability of noticeability, the latter measuring the likelihood that subjects can notice a change from a reference to a modified reference. This work is based on an efficient method for finding the perceptual quality for one metric under simplex control that extends Weber’s 1860 work on perceptual quality. However, optimally integrating the perceptual qualities of several metrics is an open problem. This article presents a formal approach to optimally combine the perceptual quality of multiple metrics into a joint measure that shows their tradeoffs. The analytical result shows that the optimal balance occurs when the probabilities of noticeability of all the component metrics are equal. The result further leads to an algorithm with a linear (instead of exponential) complexity of the number of metrics. The paper presents the application in two case studies, one on voice-over-IP (VoIP) for finding the optimal operating points and the second on multiplayer online action games (MOAG) to hide network delays while maintaining the consistency of action orders.
Benjamin W. Wah, Jingxi X. Xu, “Optimizing Multidimensional Perceptual Quality in Online Interactive Multimedia,” in IEEE MultiMedia, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 119-128, July – September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2023.3277851