Non-Intrusive Online Quality of Experience Assessment for Voice Communications

Recently user quality of experience (QoE) is employed in evaluating end user satisfaction in communications systems. Generally, current approaches for QoE assessment are obtrusive, laboratory based and offline. Estimation of user satisfaction in static manner based on mean opinion score is not directly related to instantaneous individual end user contentment. In this paper, based on correlations between user’s physiological signals and her/his feelings about the service quality, a non-intrusive and user centric QoE assessment system for voice communications is developed. The findings of this study indicate that the emotional patterns in response to the changes in channel quality can be adapted to estimate the level of satisfaction in a QoE assessment system in a live manner. Based on experimental results, two categories of users are identified: sensitive and insensitive towards quality degradations. The results indicate that for the sensitive users, our non-intrusive subjective quality assessment method outperforms ITU-T P.563 standard with respect to root mean square error; while, the results are much better among the insensitive users.