Audiovisual quality integration for interactive communications

This paper investigates multi-modal aspects of audiovisual quality assessment for interactive communication services. It shows how perceived auditory and visual qualities integrate to an overall audiovisual quality perception in different experimental contexts. Two audiovisual experiments are presented and provide experimental data for the present analysis. First, two experimental contexts are compared, i.e., passive ‘viewing and listening’ and interactive, with regard to their impact on the audiovisual qualities as subjectively perceived by the user. Second, the effects of cross-modal interactions on the assessment of the audio and video qualities are measured for those experimental contexts. The results are compared to the ones found in the literature revealing both similarities and differences in terms of magnitude and also in which cases they occur. Third, the impact of the conversational scenario on the assessment of the auditory and visual qualities is investigated. Finally, results from the literature related to audiovisual integration are gathered by the type of application. A general integration function is proposed for each category, and the performances of these ‘application-oriented’ models demonstrate a direct gain in prediction.