Hybrid Images for Personalized Media Streaming Optimization

Efficiently transmitting media while maintaining or improving the quality of experience (QoE) poses a constant challenge. On the media playback side, there exists a variety of factors affecting the resulting QoE perceived by end users, such as device characteristics, viewing conditions, and individual visual acuity. Understanding the characteristics of playback-side context can provide opportunities for optimizing media delivery tailored to each user. — We present a novel approach to estimating viewers’ visible frequency ranges by creating hybrid images in a quantitatively controlled manner. The proposed approach, which can be applied to adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming optimization, combines low- and high-frequency components of two different images providing multiscale image perception. The proposed method is designed to adjust the hybrid image size and the cutoff frequencies of lowpass and highpass filters of hybrid image synthesis according to the given frequency range under test. This method can be used to estimate the minimum video resolution for maintaining maximum QoE, in any viewing conditions and devices. — Our experimental results reveal a strong correlation between the minimum resolution obtained from hybrid image perception tasks and the traditional just noticeable difference (JND) of real images of different resolutions when presented side-by-side. These JND tasks exhibit a wider spread both in the measured minimum resolution and elapsed time to complete the tasks, potentially due to the complexity of the cognitive process and the variability caused by contents and subjects. In contrast, the hybrid image technique achieves more stable results with much less effort from subjects.

Published

2023-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

QoE (Quality of Experience), Hybrid image, playback-side context, image resolution, viewing distance, streaming optimization, personalization

DOI

10.5594/M002014

ISBN

978-1-61482-964-5