Perceptual Quality Assessment of Wireless Video Applications

The rapid evolution of wireless networks is driven by the growth of wireless packet data applications such as interactive mobile multimedia applications, wireless streaming services, and video-on-demand. The largely heterogeneous network structures, severe channel impairments, and complex traffic patterns make the wireless networks much more unpredictable compared to their wired counterparts. One of the major challenges with the roll-out of these services is therefore the design of wireless networks that fulfill the stringent quality of service requirements of wireless video applications. In this paper, the applicability of perceptual image quality metrics for real-time quality assessment of Motion JPEG2000 (MJ2) video streams over wireless channels is investigated. In particular, a reduced-reference hybrid image quality metric (HIQM) is identified as suitable for an extension to video applications. It outperforms other known metrics in terms of required overhead and prediction performance.