Assessment of IP packet loss influence on perceptual quality of streaming video

Most of the IP network impairments can cause packet loss in streaming video resulting in visible picture quality degradation on receiver screen. The type and degree of degradation depends on the video packet encapsulation and encoding technique. Experiment was set up to evaluate influence of packet loss on picture quality for several video scenes. Different packet loss rate and packet loss probability distributions are used in experiment including Poisson, Gaussian and Uniform. Experiment set-up and procedure with 40 evaluators is described. There is no significant difference observed in MOS (Mean Opinion Score) values for Poisson, Gaussian and Uniform distributions for packet loss, but scores are lower with higher packet loss ratio (1% against 0.25%). IP packet loss not more than 0.25% is about an acceptable margin for video streaming. IP packet loss of 0.25% leads to MOS 2.5, which is sometimes referred to as the acceptability limit, but it is measured only as one-dimensional satisfaction. Index Terms- Video Quality Assessment, Packet Loss and Drop, Variable Bit Rate (VBR), Packet Loss Probability Distribution Poisson, Gaussian, Uniform, Streaming, Internet Protocol (IP) and Traffic, Subjective and Objective video quality, Image and video quality assessment, Perceptual quality, ACR-HR, MOS, PSNR, MSE.