Optimizing Multidimensional Perceptual Quality in Online Interactive Multimedia

Abstract

Network latencies and losses in online interactive multimedia applications may lead to a degraded perception of quality, such as lower interactivity or sluggish responses. We can measure these degradations in perceptual quality by the just-noticeable difference, awareness, or probability of noticeability ($p_{\text{note}}$pnote); the latter measures the likelihood that subjects can notice a change from a reference to a modified reference. In our previous work, we developed an efficient method for finding the perceptual quality for one metric under simplex control. However, integrating the perceptual qualities of several metrics is a heuristic. In this article, we present a formal approach to optimally combine the perceptual quality of multiple metrics into a joint measure that shows their tradeoffs. Our result shows that the optimal balance occurs when the $p_{\text{note}}$pnote of all the component metrics are equal. Furthermore, our approach leads to an algorithm with a linear (instead of combinatorial) complexity of the number of metrics. Finally, we present the application of our method in two case studies, one on VoIP for finding the optimal operating points and the second on fast-action games to hide network delays while maintaining the consistency of action orders.