On quality of experience of scalable video adaptation

In this paper, we study the quality of experience (QoE) issues in scalable video coding (SVC) for its adaptation in video communications. A QoE assessment database is developed according to SVC scalabilities. Based on the subjective evaluation results, we derive the optimal scalability adaptation track for the individual video and further summarize common scalability adaptation tracks for videos according to their spatial information (SI) and temporal information (TI). Based on the summarized adaptation tracks, we conclude some general guidelines for the effective SVC video adaptation. A rate-QoE model for SVC adaptation is derived accordingly. Experimental results show that the proposed QoE-aware scalability adaptation scheme significantly outperforms the conventional adaptation schemes in terms of QoE. Moreover, the proposed QoE model reflects the rate and QoE relationship in SVC adaptation and thus, provides a useful methodology to estimate video QoE which is important for QoE-aware scalable video streaming. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.