HUMAN PERCEPTION OF JITTER AND MEDIA SYNCHRONIZATION

Multimedia synchronization comprises both the definition and the estab lishment of temporal relationships among media types, The presentation of 'in sync' data streams is essential to achieve a natural impressio n, data that is 'out of sync' is perceived as being somewhat artificia l, strange, or even annoying. Therefore, the goal of any multimedia sy stem is to enable an application to present data without no or little synchronization errors. The achievement of this goal requires a detail ed knowledge of the synchronization requirements at the user interface , This paper presents the results of a series of experiments about hum an media perception that may be used as 'Quality of Service' guideline s. The results show that skews between related data streams may still give the effect that the data is 'in sync' and gives some constraints under which jitter may be tolerated. We use our findings to develop a scheme for the processing of nontrivial synchronization skew between m ore than two data streams.