Subjective video quality evaluation of different content types under different impairments

ABSTRACT Nowadays, access to multimedia content is one of the most demanded services on the Internet. However, the transmission of audio and video over these networks is not free of problems that negatively affect user experience. Factors such as low image quality, cuts during playback or losses of audio or video, among others, can occur and there is no clear idea about the level of distortion introduced in the perceived quality. For that reason, different impairments should be evaluated based on user opinions, with the aim of analyzing the impact in the perceived quality. In this work, we carried out a subjective evaluation of different types of impairments with different types of contents, including news, cartoons, sports and action movies. A total of 100 individuals, between the ages of 20 and 68, participated in the subjective study. Results show that short-term rebuffering events negatively affect the quality of experience and that desynchronization between audio and video is the least annoying impairment. Moreover, we found that the content type determines the subjective results according to the impairment present during the playback.