Quality perception of advanced multimedia systems

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to introduce a special issue focused on quality perception of advanced multimedia systems. What is “quality” and how to faithfully measure it have been attracting more and more attention from various research and industrial fields of multimedia systems. Multimedia signals usually suffer from various types of distortions during capturing, compression, transmission and post-processing processes, which inevitably degrades the quality of multimedia contents and thus reduces quality of experience of the users. How to faithfully monitor, control and improve the visual quality of advanced multimedia systems becomes an important task and has been widely studied by academia and industries. In recent years, the research fields have witnessed several new trends, including the study of emerging multimedia applications, the usage of advanced learning tools, and the transferring from traditional to mobile application scenarios. This special issue is a collection of papers concerning subjective and objective quality evaluation and quality-related techniques for advanced multimedia systems, which echoes the above trends well. Papers in this special issue are categorized into four groups: 1. Overview and survey papers on quality models and metrics; 2. Quality perception for emerging multimedia applications; 3. Quality perception modeling using advanced learning tools; 4. Quality perception modeling for mobile applications. Naturally, some papers may not only belong to a single group, for example a paper can use advanced learning techniques to handle emerging multimedia applications. Those papers will be introduced in all corresponding groups.