QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE OF MULTIMEDIA SERVICES

Abstract

Nowadays, multimedia services are becoming a part of the individual’s life; and thus, many ongoing efforts have been given to develop and optimize the technology for multimedia content creation, distribution, and consumption. As a result of advancement in the technology, there is a rivalry among the standards, services, and thus, the service providers. In this context, assurance of the consumer satisfaction by providing a required level of quality for the provided service is of crucial importance for the service providers. From another viewpoint, providing a better Quality of Experience (QoE) to the provided service could be a differentiation strategy to achieve the competitive advantage. To provide the best QoE, all the involving entities in the multimedia communication chain should pose a defined quality level. Moreover, the QoE centric operations and optimization techniques should be incorporated in the multimedia communication system. For QoE centric operation and optimization, the assessment of the QoE of the service is an important step, and thus, the QoE assessment is a scope of this dissertation. Among multimedia services, the video communication is becoming a dominant service. Moreover, the latest advancement in imaging technology–light field imaging, is expected to be a next generation imaging technology. Due to the possibilities of a wide range of applications provided by the light field imaging, lots of attention is pulled from industry and academia by this technology. Therefore, this dissertation is mainly focused on two types of multimedia content: video and light field image. Every step involved in multimedia communication such as acquisition, representation, encoding, network, and rendering/presentation, produces the artifacts, and ultimately degrades the quality. The main aim of this dissertation is to propose the novel theories and frameworks for assessing the QoE of video and light field image.