1st edition of QoMEx revisted

The first edition of the International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEx) ended today and I'd like to thank the general chairs Touradj Ebrahimi (EPFL/NTNU) and Khaled El-Maleh (Qualcomm) for making this happen and, in particular, Qualcomm for hosting the event. It was a very good workshop with a lot of interesting papers presenting research results around the topics user experience assessment/enhancement, visual/auditory user experience, and standardization activities in multimedia quality evaluation.

The technical program provided a set of plenary talks (incl. a broad range of topics), oral and poster sessions, and a panel about tools, targets, and trends in the area of Quality of Experience (QoE). The panel - organized by Fernando Pereira - was particularly interesting as each panelist provided one slide related to tools, targets, and trends respectively.

Sebastian Möller (Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin University of Technology) reported that QoE is being recognized and considered by operators. Stefan Winkler, author of the Digital Video Quality book, has shown the the "QoS/QoE life-cycle" which he adapted from ITU-T Rec. G.1000 and COM12-C185-E. He is also very active in the Video Services Forum, Inc. (VSF) and ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) which provide standards in the area of QoE.
Alan Bovik said he is a video guy that likes perception. Furthermore, he identified the need for better models how image/video is perceived which indeed requires interdisciplinary as shown in the left figure. Finally, Gary Sullivan's target regarding QoE is to have something like “This technology saves x% of the bit rate relative to that technology”. Towards the end of the panel Vittorio Baroncini proposed to merge VCEG and VQEG as the "only solution".

The winner of the Qualcomm Best Student Paper is "Subjective assessment of H.264/AVC video sequences transmitted over a noisy channel" co-authored by Francesca De Simone et.al. The best paper award goes to "Gradient Ascent Paired-Comparison Subjective Quality Testing" co-authored by Stephen Voran and Andrew Catellier. Congratulations to the winners and, of course, also the nominees (seven in each category) who will be invited to submit their papers to a special issue on QoE in an EURASIP journal.

On the logistics, they managed to provide an online stream of all the sessions via ustream, recorded all sessions using a 3D camera, and collected the presentations of all speakers. I'm sure sooner or later these resources become available at the QoMEx Web site.

Finally, the next edition - QoMEx 2010 - will be in Trondheim, Norway hosted by NTNU with Andrew Perkis as the general chair in the second half of June 2010. It seems he will have a hard time to attach to QoMEx 2009 but I'm also sure he will manage it and will be able to keep, or even increase, the level of quality in this workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience. See you at QoMEx 2010 and stay tuned...

PS: Forgot that we had a paper there and details about this can be found here.