Perceived quality of audio-visual stimuli containing streaming audio degradations

Abstract

Multimedia services play an important role in modern human communication. Understanding the impact of multisensory input (audio and video) on perceived quality is important for optimizing the delivery of these services. This work explores the impact of audio degradations on audio-visual quality. With this goal, we present a new dataset that contains audio-visual sequences with distortions only in the audio component (Im-AV-Exp2). The degradations in this new dataset correspond to commonly encountered streaming degradations, matching those found in the audio-only TCD-VoIP dataset. Using the Immersive Methodology, we perform a subjective experiment with the Im-AV-Exp2 dataset. We analyze the experimental data and compared the quality scores of the Im-AV-Exp2 and TCD-VoIP datasets. Results show that the video component act as a masking factor for certain classes of audio degradations (e.g. echo), showing that there is an interaction of video and audio quality that may depend on content.