Transmission of video content over wireless access networks (in particular, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and Third Generation Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (3G UMTS)) is growing exponentially and gaining popularity, and is predicted to expose new revenue streams for mobile network operators. However, the success of these video applications over wireless access networks very much depend on meeting the user’s Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Thus, it is highly desirable to be able to predict and, if appropriate, to control video quality to meet user’s QoS requirements. Video quality is affected by distortions caused by the encoder and the wireless access network. The impact of these distortions is content dependent, but this feature has not been widely used in existing video quality prediction models. The main aim of the project is the development of novel and efficient models for video quality prediction in a non-intrusive way for low bitrate and resolution videos and to demonstrate their application in QoS-driven adaptation schemes for mobile video streaming applications. This led to five main contributions of the thesis as follows:(1) A thorough understanding of the relationships between video quality, wireless access network (UMTS and WLAN) parameters (e.g. packet/block loss, mean burst length and link bandwidth), encoder parameters (e.g. sender bitrate, frame rate) and content type is provided. An understanding of the relationships and interactions between them and their impact on video quality is important as it provides a basis for the development of non-intrusive video quality prediction models.(2) A new content classification method was proposed based on statistical tools as content type was found to be the most important parameter. (3) Efficient regression-based and artificial neural network-based learning models were developed for video quality prediction over WLAN and UMTS access networks. The models are light weight (can be implemented in real time monitoring), provide a measure for user perceived quality, without time consuming subjective tests. The models have potential applications in several other areas, including QoS control and optimization in network planning and content provisioning for network/service providers.(4) The applications of the proposed regression-based models were investigated in (i) optimization of content provisioning and network resource utilization and (ii) A new fuzzy sender bitrate adaptation scheme was presented at the sender side over WLAN and UMTS access networks. (5) Finally, Internet-based subjective tests that captured distortions caused by the encoder and the wireless access network for different types of contents were designed. The database of subjective results has been made available to research community as there is a lack of subjective video quality assessment databases.

Atualmente existem inúmeros serviços multimídia que são transportados através da rede IP, dos quais, o tráfego dos serviços de vídeo experimentou um maior crescimento nos últimos anos. O sucesso de aplicações de streaming de vídeo é um dos fatores pelo qual, este tráfego se incrementou. Alguns recentes estudos projetam que este tipo de serviços no ano 2016, alcançará aproximadamente o 55% do tráfego total da Internet. Considerando a importância que os serviços de vídeo alcançarão nos próximos anos, este trabalho foca-se na avaliação da qualidade de experiência (QoE) dos usuários ao utilizar estes serviços. Assim, nesta tese é proposta uma métrica de avaliação de vídeo denominada eVsQM, do inglês enhanced Video streaming Quality Metric, a qual é baseada principalmente no número, duração e localização temporal dos congelamentos de imagens (pausas) durante uma transmissão de vídeo, considerando também o tipo de conteúdo do vídeo transmitido. Esta métrica foi determinada a partir de um modelo matemático que utilizou os resultados de testes subjetivos de avaliação de vídeo, pois, este tipo de testes são os que melhor se aproximam da QoE real do usuário. Cabe destacar, que na realização dos testes subjetivos foi utilizada uma metodologia concordante com o tipo de degradação que o vídeo possui, ou seja, a pausa. No streaming de vídeo novas soluções são criadas com a finalidade de melhorar a QoE do usuário. O DASH, do inglês Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, muda a resolução do vídeo transmitido de acordo com as características da rede. Porém, se a rede é muito flutuante existirão muitas variações de resolução e a QoE do usuário será degradada. Neste trabalho é proposto um parâmetro a ser utilizado no algoritmo DASH que funciona como um limiar para controlar a frequência destas comutações de resolução. Este parâmetro é denominado como SDF (do inglês Switching Degradation Factor) e permite que a QoE mantida em níveis aceitáveis, inclusive em situações onde a rede é muito flutuante. Adicionalmente, neste trabalho é proposto um novo modelo de faturamento nos serviços de telecomunicações, que inclua no processo de tarifação um parâmetro relacionado com a QoE, visando ter uma tarifação de serviços de comunicações mais justa do ponto de vista dos usuários. Desta forma, usuários que recebem uma menor qualidade no serviço devem pagar menos em relação aos usuários que recebem uma melhor qualidade do mesmo serviço. / Nowadays, there are several multimedia services, which are carried via IP networks. From these all services; the traffic regarding video applications had the greatest growth in the last years. The success of video streaming applications is one of the major contributors to video traffic growth. Some recent studies project that video services, will reach approximately 55% of the total Internet traffic in 2016. Considering the relevance that video services will achieve in the coming years, this work focuses on the users Quality of Experience (QoE) when using these services. Thus, this thesis proposes an evaluation metric named enhanced Video streaming Quality Metric (eVsQM), which is based primarily on the number, duration and temporal location of the image freezes (pauses) during a video transmission. Also, this metric considers the video content type and was determined from a mathematical model that used as inputs, the video quality assessment results from subjective tests due, these types of test are the most correlated with real users QoE. It is worth noting that to perform these subjective tests was used a methodology consistent with the kind of video degradation (pause). For another hand, new video streaming solutions are created for the purpose of improving the users QoE of the user. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) changes the video resolution according to the network characteristics. However, if the network is very fluctuant, many video resolution switching events will be performed and users QoE will be degraded. This thesis proposes a parameter to be used in DASH algorithms that works as a threshold to control the resolution switching frequency. This parameter is named Switching Degradation Factor (SDF) and is responsible to maintain the QoE in acceptable levels, inclusive in scenarios in which the network capacity is very fluctuating.

Atualmente existem inúmeros serviços multimídia que são transportados através da rede IP, dos quais, o tráfego dos serviços de vídeo experimentou um maior crescimento nos últimos anos. O sucesso de aplicações de streaming de vídeo é um dos fatores pelo qual, este tráfego se incrementou. Alguns recentes estudos projetam que este tipo de serviços no ano 2016, alcançará aproximadamente o 55% do tráfego total da Internet. Considerando a importância que os serviços de vídeo alcançarão nos próximos anos, este trabalho foca-se na avaliação da qualidade de experiência (QoE) dos usuários ao utilizar estes serviços. Assim, nesta tese é proposta uma métrica de avaliação de vídeo denominada eVsQM, do inglês enhanced Video streaming Quality Metric, a qual é baseada principalmente no número, duração e localização temporal dos congelamentos de imagens (pausas) durante uma transmissão de vídeo, considerando também o tipo de conteúdo do vídeo transmitido. Esta métrica foi determinada a partir de um modelo matemático que utilizou os resultados de testes subjetivos de avaliação de vídeo, pois, este tipo de testes são os que melhor se aproximam da QoE real do usuário. Cabe destacar, que na realização dos testes subjetivos foi utilizada uma metodologia concordante com o tipo de degradação que o vídeo possui, ou seja, a pausa. No streaming de vídeo novas soluções são criadas com a finalidade de melhorar a QoE do usuário. O DASH, do inglês Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, muda a resolução do vídeo transmitido de acordo com as características da rede. Porém, se a rede é muito flutuante existirão muitas variações de resolução e a QoE do usuário será degradada. Neste trabalho é proposto um parâmetro a ser utilizado no algoritmo DASH que funciona como um limiar para controlar a frequência destas comutações de resolução. Este parâmetro é denominado como SDF (do inglês Switching Degradation Factor) e permite que a QoE mantida em níveis aceitáveis, inclusive em situações onde a rede é muito flutuante. Adicionalmente, neste trabalho é proposto um novo modelo de faturamento nos serviços de telecomunicações, que inclua no processo de tarifação um parâmetro relacionado com a QoE, visando ter uma tarifação de serviços de comunicações mais justa do ponto de vista dos usuários. Desta forma, usuários que recebem uma menor qualidade no serviço devem pagar menos em relação aos usuários que recebem uma melhor qualidade do mesmo serviço. / Nowadays, there are several multimedia services, which are carried via IP networks. From these all services; the traffic regarding video applications had the greatest growth in the last years. The success of video streaming applications is one of the major contributors to video traffic growth. Some recent studies project that video services, will reach approximately 55% of the total Internet traffic in 2016. Considering the relevance that video services will achieve in the coming years, this work focuses on the users Quality of Experience (QoE) when using these services. Thus, this thesis proposes an evaluation metric named enhanced Video streaming Quality Metric (eVsQM), which is based primarily on the number, duration and temporal location of the image freezes (pauses) during a video transmission. Also, this metric considers the video content type and was determined from a mathematical model that used as inputs, the video quality assessment results from subjective tests due, these types of test are the most correlated with real users QoE. It is worth noting that to perform these subjective tests was used a methodology consistent with the kind of video degradation (pause). For another hand, new video streaming solutions are created for the purpose of improving the users QoE of the user. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) changes the video resolution according to the network characteristics. However, if the network is very fluctuant, many video resolution switching events will be performed and users QoE will be degraded. This thesis proposes a parameter to be used in DASH algorithms that works as a threshold to control the resolution switching frequency. This parameter is named Switching Degradation Factor (SDF) and is responsible to maintain the QoE in acceptable levels, inclusive in scenarios in which the network capacity is very fluctuating.

Ces dernières années la diffusion vidéo "de salon" a connu trois transitions majeures : la compression vidéo aévolué de la norme MPEG2 à la norme h.264, les écrans à tube cathodique ont disparu du marché des téléviseurs quiest actuellement dominé par les écrans à cristaux liquides (LCD) et pour nir le format haute-définition (1280x720pixels ou 1920x1080) supplante de plus en plus le format SD (576x720). Ces évolutions ont modifié l'importancedes différents types de défauts de compression pour la perception de la qualité d'une vidéo. Les défauts majeursde compression vidéo sont désormais le ou et les défauts temporels. Le terme défaut temporel regroupe ici lavariation temporelle de défauts spatiaux comme l'effet de bloc et des défauts spécifiquement temporels comme lebruit de moustique.Nous nous sommes tout d'abord focalisés sur la correction du bruit de moustique. Le correcteur que nousproposons, le TVIF, est adapté aux trois caractéristiques de ce défaut : faible amplitude par rapport au contenulocal, proximité des contours et variation temporelle. Nous avons évalué l'efficacité de notre correcteur avec desmétriques objectives mais, celles-ci ne permettant pas de conclure sur les performances de notre ltre, nousavons organisé une expérience subjective de qualité. Les données recueillies lors de cette expérience indiquentque les observateurs perçoivent notre filtre comme une amélioration et que la version spatio-temporelle de notrecorrecteur est préférée à sa version spatiale. Reboucler sur les évaluations objectives nous permet de conclure queles métriques objectives ne mesurent pas adéquatement la correction du bruit de moustique, ni l'apport de lacorrection spatio-temporelle par rapport à la correction spatiale.Nous avons ensuite organisé une expérience couplant évaluation de qualité (globale et temporelle) et enregistrementsdes positions oculaires des observateurs. Cette expérience nous permet de spécifier plusieurs pointsutiles pour réaliser une métrique objective de qualité temporelle. Par exemple, le défaut le plus gênant pour laperception de la qualité globale est la variation d'effet de bloc, qui doit donc être la priorité d'une métrique dequalité temporelle. L'analyse des mouvements oculaires des observateurs en tâche libre, tâche de qualité globaleet tâche de qualité temporelle montre, entre autres, que la qualité de la vidéo diffusée n'a pas d'influence visiblesur les endroits regardés par les participants mais influence fortement la durée des fixations. / Home video has gone through three major transitions within the past years: from the MPEG2 videocompression norm to the h.264 one, from cathode ray tube screens to liquid crystal display screens andfrom standard definition (576x720) to High-Definition (1280x720 or 1920x1080). Those changes havemodified the importance of each type of compression artifacts for quality assessment, relatively to oneanother. The two main compression artifacts are currently blur and temporal defects, including under thisterm temporal variations of spatial defects and artifacts specifically temporal such as mosquito noise.We first focused on filtering mosquito noise and presented the TVIF, a corrector adapted to this noise:small amplitude compared to the nearest edge, proximity to edges and variation through time. We firsttried to use objective quality metrics to assess the performance of our corrector. As it proved to beinconclusive, we set up a subjective experiment which showed that observers perceived our corrector asan enhancement and that they preferred the spatio-temporal correction to the spatial one. Going backover objective evaluations with the subjective ones showed that the metrics we used correctly assessneither the correction nor the gain in quality of the spatio-temporal correction over the spatial one.We then set up an experiment combining quality evaluation (both global and temporal) and recordings ofeye movements. The aim of this experiment is to specify some key points for designing an objectivetemporal quality metric. One example is that observers found that temporal variations of blocking effectare the most annoying defect global quality and, as such, should be the main focus of a temporal qualitymetric. Analysis of eye-movements of observers during free task, global quality task and temporal qualitytask shows, among other things, that quality has no visible influence on the places observers watch buthighly influences the duration of fixations. The evolutions over time of all the oculomotor parameters(saccades speed, fixation locations and durations) are similar for the three tasks during the first 1 or 2seconds of the videos and that the differences between tasks appear later on. It seems that the task toassess video quality plays a role afterwards on the deployment of visual attention.

Objective Image and Video Quality Assessment (I/VQA) measures predict image/video quality as perceived by human beings - the ultimate consumers of visual data. Existing research in the area is mainly limited to benchmarking and monitoring of visual data. The use of I/VQA measures in the design and optimization of image/video processing algorithms and systems is more desirable, challenging and fruitful but has not been well explored. Among the recently proposed objective I/VQA approaches, the structural similarity (SSIM) index and its variants have emerged as promising measures that show superior performance as compared to the widely used mean squared error (MSE) and are computationally simple compared with other state-of-the-art perceptual quality measures. In addition, SSIM has a number of desirable mathematical properties for optimization tasks. The goal of this research is to break the tradition of using MSE as the optimization criterion for image and video processing algorithms. We tackle several important problems in visual communication applications by exploiting SSIM-inspired design and optimization to achieve significantly better performance. Firstly, the original SSIM is a Full-Reference IQA (FR-IQA) measure that requires access to the original reference image, making it impractical in many visual communication applications. We propose a general purpose Reduced-Reference IQA (RR-IQA) method that can estimate SSIM with high accuracy with the help of a small number of RR features extracted from the original image. Furthermore, we introduce and demonstrate the novel idea of partially repairing an image using RR features. Secondly, image processing algorithms such as image de-noising and image super-resolution are required at various stages of visual communication systems, starting from image acquisition to image display at the receiver. We incorporate SSIM into the framework of sparse signal representation and non-local means methods and demonstrate improved performance in image de-noising and super-resolution. Thirdly, we incorporate SSIM into the framework of perceptual video compression. We propose an SSIM-based rate-distortion optimization scheme and an SSIM-inspired divisive optimization method that transforms the DCT domain frame residuals to a perceptually uniform space. Both approaches demonstrate the potential to largely improve the rate-distortion performance of state-of-the-art video codecs. Finally, in real-world visual communications, it is a common experience that end-users receive video with significantly time-varying quality due to the variations in video content/complexity, codec configuration, and network conditions. How human visual quality of experience (QoE) changes with such time-varying video quality is not yet well-understood. We propose a quality adaptation model that is asymmetrically tuned to increasing and decreasing quality. The model improves upon the direct SSIM approach in predicting subjective perceptual experience of time-varying video quality.

Objective Image and Video Quality Assessment (I/VQA) measures predict image/video quality as perceived by human beings - the ultimate consumers of visual data. Existing research in the area is mainly limited to benchmarking and monitoring of visual data. The use of I/VQA measures in the design and optimization of image/video processing algorithms and systems is more desirable, challenging and fruitful but has not been well explored. Among the recently proposed objective I/VQA approaches, the structural similarity (SSIM) index and its variants have emerged as promising measures that show superior performance as compared to the widely used mean squared error (MSE) and are computationally simple compared with other state-of-the-art perceptual quality measures. In addition, SSIM has a number of desirable mathematical properties for optimization tasks. The goal of this research is to break the tradition of using MSE as the optimization criterion for image and video processing algorithms. We tackle several important problems in visual communication applications by exploiting SSIM-inspired design and optimization to achieve significantly better performance. Firstly, the original SSIM is a Full-Reference IQA (FR-IQA) measure that requires access to the original reference image, making it impractical in many visual communication applications. We propose a general purpose Reduced-Reference IQA (RR-IQA) method that can estimate SSIM with high accuracy with the help of a small number of RR features extracted from the original image. Furthermore, we introduce and demonstrate the novel idea of partially repairing an image using RR features. Secondly, image processing algorithms such as image de-noising and image super-resolution are required at various stages of visual communication systems, starting from image acquisition to image display at the receiver. We incorporate SSIM into the framework of sparse signal representation and non-local means methods and demonstrate improved performance in image de-noising and super-resolution. Thirdly, we incorporate SSIM into the framework of perceptual video compression. We propose an SSIM-based rate-distortion optimization scheme and an SSIM-inspired divisive optimization method that transforms the DCT domain frame residuals to a perceptually uniform space. Both approaches demonstrate the potential to largely improve the rate-distortion performance of state-of-the-art video codecs. Finally, in real-world visual communications, it is a common experience that end-users receive video with significantly time-varying quality due to the variations in video content/complexity, codec configuration, and network conditions. How human visual quality of experience (QoE) changes with such time-varying video quality is not yet well-understood. We propose a quality adaptation model that is asymmetrically tuned to increasing and decreasing quality. The model improves upon the direct SSIM approach in predicting subjective perceptual experience of time-varying video quality.

Les objectifs de ce travail de thèse ont été: d’une part de détecter automatique-ment les images gelées dans des vidéos télédiffusées; et d’autre part de mesurer sans référencela qualité des vidéos télédiffusées (IP et DVB-T). Ces travaux ont été effectués dans le cadred’un projet de recherche mené conjointement par le LaBRI et la société Audemat WorldCastSystems.Pour la détection d’images gelées, trois méthodes ont été proposées: MV (basée vecteurde mouvement), DC (basée sur les coefficients DC de la DCT) et SURF (basée sur les pointscaractéristiques SURF). Les deux premières méthodes ne nécessitent qu’un décodage partieldu flux vidéo.Le second objectif était de mesurer sans référence la qualité des vidéos télédiffusées (IP etDVB-T). Une métrique a été développée pour mesurer la qualité perçue lorsque le flux vidéoa été altéré par des pertes de transmission. Cette métrique "Weighted Macro-Block ErrorRate" (WMBER) est fondée sur la mesure de la saillance visuelle et la détection des macro-blocs endommagés. Le rôle de la saillance visuelle est de pondérer l’importance des erreursdétectées. Certaines améliorations ont été apportées à la construction des cartes de saillancespatio-temporelle. En particulier, la fusion des cartes de saillance spatiale et temporelle aété améliorée par rapport à l’état de l’art. Par ailleurs, plusieurs études ont montré que lasémantique d’une scène visuelle avait une influence sur le comportement du système visuelhumain. Il apparaît que ce sont surtout les visages humains qui attirent le regard. C’est laraison pour laquelle nous avons ajouté une dimension sémantique aux cartes de saillancespatio-temporelle. Cette dimension sémantique est essentiellement basée sur le détecteurde visage de Viola Jones. Pour prédire la qualité perçue par les utilisateurs, nous avonsutilisé une méthode par apprentissage supervisé. Cette méthode offre ainsi la possibilité deprédire la métrique subjective "Mean Opinion Score" (MOS) à partir de mesures objectivestelles que le WMBER, PSNR ou SSIM. Une expérience psycho-visuelle a été menée avec 50sujets pour évaluer ces travaux. Cette base de données vidéo Haute-Définition est en coursde transfert à l’action COST Qualinet. Ces travaux ont également été évalués sur une autrebase de données vidéo (en définition standard) provenant de l’IRCCyN / The goal of this Ph.D thesis is to design a no-reference video quality assessment method for lossy net-works. This Ph.D thesis is conducted in collaboration with the Audemat Worldcast Systemscompany.Our first no-reference video quality assessment indicator is the frozen frame detection.Frozen frame detection was a research topic which was well studied in the past decades.However, the challenge is to embed a frozen frame detection method in the GoldenEagleAudemat equipment. This equipment has low computation resources that not allow real-time HD video decoding. Two methods are proposed: one based on the compressed videostream motion vectors (MV-method) and another one based on the DC coefficients from thedct transform (DC-method). Both methods only require the partial decoding of the com-pressed video stream which allows for real-time analysis on the GoldenEagle equipment.The evaluation shows that results are better than the frame difference base-line method.Nevertheless, the MV and the DC methods are only suitable with for MPEG2 and H.264video streams. So a third method based on SURF points is proposed.As a second step on the way to a no-reference video quality assessment metric, we areinterested in the visual perception of transmission impairments. We propose a full-referencemetric based on saliency maps. This metric, Weighted Mean Squared Error (WMSE), is theMSE metric weighted by the saliency map. The saliency map role is to distinguish betweennoticeable and unnoticeable transmission impairments. Therefore this spatio-temporal saliencymaps is computed on the impaired frame. Thus the pixel difference in the MSE computationis emphasized or diminished with regard to the pixel saliency. According to the state of theart, several improvements are brought to the saliency map computation process. Especially,new spatio-temporal saliency map fusion strategies are designed.After our successful attempt to assess the video quality with saliency maps, we develop ano-reference quality metric. This metric, Weighted Macro-Block Error Rate (WMBER), relies on the saliency map and the macro-block error detection. The macro-block error detectionprovides the impaired macro-blocks location in the frame. However, the impaired macro-blocks are concealed with more or less success during the decoding process. So the saliencymap provides the user perceived impairment strength for each macro-block.Several psycho-visual studies have shown that semantics play an important role in visualscene perception. These studies conclude that faces and text are the most attractive. Toimprove the spatio-temporal saliency model a semantic dimension is added. This semanticsaliency is based on the Viola & Jones face detector.To predict the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) from objective metric values like WMBER,WMSE, PSNR or SSIM, we propose to use a supervised learning approach. This approach iscalled Similarity Weighted Average (SWA). Several improvements are brought to the originalSWA.For the metrics evaluation a psycho-visual experiment with 50 subjects has been carriedout. To measure the saliency map models accuracy, a psycho-visual experiment with aneye-tracker has also been carried out. These two experiments habe been conducted in col-laboration with the Ben Gurion University, Israel. WMBER and WMSE performances arecompared with reference metrics like SSIM and PSNR. The proposed metrics are also testedon a database provided by IRCCyN research laboratory.

L'objectif de cette thèse est le déploiement et l'évaluation d'une plate-forme de télé-échographie mobile, utilisée pour fournir un diagnostic et des soins à distance dans des milieux médicalement isolés. La plateforme intègre de nouveaux concepts qui permettent de l’utilisation de la télé-échographie robotisée sur les réseaux sans fil 3G, 4G et 5G pour satisfaire au transfert de qualité des vidéos ultrasonores pour un diagnostic médical robuste. Ce travail contribue au domaine des Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication appliquées au secteur de la santé et en particulier à la robotique médicale téléopérée. Les principales contributions de la thèse sont : I. Un état de l’art des systèmes télé-robotiques appliqués au médical menée sur la base de publications écrites entre 2004 et 2016, II. L'évaluation objective et subjective (clinique) de la qualité vidéo a démontré que les normes H.264/AVC et HEVC peuvent atteindre une qualité vidéo sans perte de diagnostic à des débits (1024 et 2048 Kbps) bien en deçà des débits de données supportés par les réseaux 4G. Les normes de codage vidéo antérieures (Mpeg-4, Mpeg-2) ne peuvent pas être utilisées pour le diagnostic clinique à ces débits car elles présentent une perte d'information pour le diagnostic médical, III. Les experts médicaux ont apprécié la réactivité dynamique mécanique de la plate-forme en raison du faible délai présenté par les canaux LTE. La limitation la plus importante soulevée par l'expert médical, empêchant une évaluation globale clinique favorable au diagnostic, était le positionnement initial du robot sur le corps du patient et son déplacement vers l'obtention d’une échographie cardiaque, Les résultats fournissent une forte indication que la plate-forme télé-échographie robotisée peut être utilisée pour fournir un diagnostic fiable et à distance sur les réseaux sans fil émergents 4G et au-delà. / The objective of this Thesis was the deployment and evaluation of an end-to-end mobile tele-echography platform used to provide remote diagnosis and care within medically isolated settings. The platform integrates new concepts that enable robotized tele-echography over commercially available 4G and beyond mobile networks for rendering diagnostically robust medical ultrasound video. It contributes to the field of Information and Communication technologies applied in the healthcare sector. The main contributions of the Thesis are: I. A systematic review on the state of the art in medical telerobotic systems was conducted based on publications of the last decade, and more specifically between the years 2004 to 2016. II. Both objective and subjective (clinical) video quality assessment demonstrated that H.264/AVC and HEVC standards can achieve diagnostically-lossless video quality at bitrates (1024 and 2048 Kbps) well within the LTE supported data rates. Earlier video coding standards (Mpeg-4 & Mpeg-2) cannot be employed for clinical diagnosis at these rates as they present loss of clinical information.III. Medical experts highly appreciated the proposed platform’s mechanical dynamic responsiveness due to the low end-to-end delay (latency) facilitated by LTE-channels. The most important limitation raised by the medical expert and prevented higher overall rating and ultimately clinical QoE was the robot initial positioning on the patient’s body and navigation towards obtaining the cardiac ultrasound. IV. Results provides a strong indication that the proposed robotized tele-echography platform can be used to provide reliable, remote diagnosis over emerging 4G and beyond wireless networks.

The use of audio and video communication has increased exponentially over the last decade and has gone from speech over GSM to HD resolution video conference between continents on mobile devices. As the use becomes more widespread the interest in delivering high quality media increases even on devices with limited resources. This includes both development and enhancement of the communication chain but also the topic of objective measurements of the perceived quality. The focus of this thesis work has been to perform enhancement within speech encoding and video decoding, to measure influence factors of audio and video performance, and to build methods to predict the perceived video quality. The audio enhancement part of this thesis addresses the well known problem in the GSM system with an interfering signal generated by the switching nature of TDMA cellular telephony. Two different solutions are given to suppress such interference internally in the mobile handset. The first method involves the use of subtractive noise cancellation employing correlators, the second uses a structure of IIR notch filters. Both solutions use control algorithms based on the state of the communication between the mobile handset and the base station. The video enhancement part presents two post-filters. These two filters are designed to improve visual quality of highly compressed video streams from standard, block-based video codecs by combating both blocking and ringing artifacts. The second post-filter also performs sharpening. The third part addresses the problem of measuring audio and video delay as well as skewness between these, also known as synchronization. This method is a black box technique which enables it to be applied on any audiovisual application, proprietary as well as open standards, and can be run on any platform and over any network connectivity. The last part addresses no-reference (NR) bitstream video quality prediction using features extracted from the coded video stream. Several methods have been used and evaluated: Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Least Square Support Vector Machines (LS-SVM), showing high correlation with both MOS and objective video assessment methods as PSNR and PEVQ. The impact from temporal, spatial and quantization variations on perceptual video quality has also been addressed, together with the trade off between these, and for this purpose a set of locally conducted subjective experiments were performed.

<p>У овој дисертацији разматране су објективне мере процене квалитета<br />слике и видеа са потпуним и делимичним референцирањем на изворни<br />сигнал. За потребе евалуације квалитета развијене су поуздане,<br />рачунски ефикасне мере, засноване на очувању информација о<br />градијенту. Мере су тестиране на великом броју тест слика и видео<br />секвенци, различитих типова и степена деградације. Поред јавно<br />доступних база слика и видео секвенци, за потребе истраживања<br />формиране су и нове базе видео секвенци са преко 300 релевантних<br />тест узорака. Поређењем доступних субјективних и објективних скорова<br />квалитета показано је да је објективна евалуација квалитета веома<br />сложен проблем, али га је могуће решити и доћи до високих<br />перформанси коришћењем предложених мера процене квалитета слике<br />и видеа.</p> / <p>U ovoj disertaciji razmatrane su objektivne mere procene kvaliteta<br />slike i videa sa potpunim i delimičnim referenciranjem na izvorni<br />signal. Za potrebe evaluacije kvaliteta razvijene su pouzdane,<br />računski efikasne mere, zasnovane na očuvanju informacija o<br />gradijentu. Mere su testirane na velikom broju test slika i video<br />sekvenci, različitih tipova i stepena degradacije. Pored javno<br />dostupnih baza slika i video sekvenci, za potrebe istraživanja<br />formirane su i nove baze video sekvenci sa preko 300 relevantnih<br />test uzoraka. Poređenjem dostupnih subjektivnih i objektivnih skorova<br />kvaliteta pokazano je da je objektivna evaluacija kvaliteta veoma<br />složen problem, ali ga je moguće rešiti i doći do visokih<br />performansi korišćenjem predloženih mera procene kvaliteta slike<br />i videa.</p> / <p>This thesis presents an investigation into objective image and video quality<br />assessment with full and reduced reference on original (source) signal. For<br />quality evaluation purposes, reliable, computational efficient, gradient-based<br />measures are developed. Proposed measures are tested on different image<br />and video datasets, with various types of distorsions and degradation levels.<br />Along with publicly available image and video quality datasets, new video<br />quality datasets are maded, with more than 300 relevant test samples.<br />Through comparison between available subjective and objective quality<br />scores it has been shown that objective quality evaluation is highly complex<br />problem, but it is possible to resolve it and acchieve high performance using<br />proposed quality measures.</p>