Audio-Visual Multimedia Quality Assessment: A Comprehensive Survey

Measuring perceived quality of audio-visual signals at the end-user has become an important parameter in many multimedia networks and applications. It plays a crucial role in shaping audio-visual processing, compression, transmission and systems, along with their implementation, optimization, and testing. Service providers are enacting different quality of service (QoS) solutions to issue the best quality of experience (QoE) to their customers. Thus, devising precise perception-based quality metrics will greatly help improving multimedia services over wired and wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the works that have been carried out over recent decades in perceptual audio, video, and joint audio-visual quality assessments, describing existing methodologies in terms of requirement of a reference signal, feature extraction, feature mapping, and classification schemes. In this context, an overview of quality formation and perception, QoS, QoE as well as quality of perception is also presented. Finally, open issues and challenges in audio-visual quality assessment are highlighted and potential future research directions are discussed.