Experimental evaluation of loss perception in continuous media

Perception of multimedia quality, specified by quality-of-service (QoS) metrics, can be used by system designers to optimize customer satisfaction within resource bounds enforced by general-purpose computing platforms. Media losses, rate variations and transient synchronization losses have been suspected to affect human perception of multimedia quality. This paper presents metrics to measure such defects, and results of a series of user experiments that justify such speculations. Results of the study provide bounds on losses, rate variations and transient synchronization losses as a function of user satisfaction, in the form of Likert values. It is shown how these results can be used by algorithm designers of underlying multimedia systems.