Feature fusion quality assessment model for DASH video streaming

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) employs the flexible rate adaptation scheme to combat with time-varying channel conditions. In addition to compression impairment, DASH video streaming suffers from transmission impairment, such as rate switches and stalling events. Both of them severely degrade users' Quality of Experience (QoE). Herein, an assessment model is established for DASH video streaming by directly jointing multiple QoE influential factors, which quantify impairments resulting from the compression and transmission. To demonstrate the influence of video content characteristics on users' QoE, spatio-temporal content perceptual features are employed to represent the compression impairment. When reflecting temporal characteristics, a novel motion vector padding method is proposed to quantify the influence of intra macroblock on the human visual system. The proposed model is evaluated on a newly public Waterloo SQoE-III database, which is available for DASH video streaming. Experimental results demonstrate that the authors' model outperforms the comparative models and owns the strong generalization ability to different video contents. Moreover, the proposed model is statistically superior to the existing models.