A control toolbox for measuring audiovisual quality of experience

Abstract

Q2S is an organization dedicated to measure perceived quality of multimedia content. In order make such measurements, subjective assessments is held where a test subject gives rating based on the perceived, subjective quality of the presented multimedia content. Subjective quality assessments are important in order to achieve a high rate of user satisfaction when viewing multimedia presentations. Human perception of quality, if quantified, can be used to adjust presented media to maximize the user experience, or even improve compression techniques with respect to human perception. In this thesis, software for setting up subjective assessments using a state-of-the-art video clip recorder has been developed. The software has been custom made to ensure compatibility with the hardware Q2S has available. Development has been done in Java. To let the test subject give feedback about the presented material, a MIDI device is available. SALT, an application used to log MIDI messages, has been integrated in the software to log user activiy. This report will outline the main structure of the software that has been developed during the thesis. The important elements of the software structure will be explained in detail. The tools that have been used will be discussed, focusing on the parts that have been used in the thesis. Problems with both hardware and software will be documented, as well as workarounds and limitations for the software developed.