Experimental evaluation of loss perception in continuous media

Perception of multimedia quality, specified by quality-of-service (QoS) met rics, can be used by system designers to optimize customer satisfaction wit hin resource bounds enforced by general-purpose computing platforms. Media losses, rate variations and transient synchronization losses have been susp ected to affect human perception of multimedia quality. This paper presents metrics to measure such defects, and results of a series of user experimen ts that justify such speculations. Results of the study provide bounds on l osses, rate variations and transient synchronization losses as a function o f user satisfaction, in the form of Likert values. It is shown how these re sults can be used by algorithm designers of underlying multimedia systems.