User-Perceived QoE Adaptation for Accelerated Playback in Mobile Video Streaming

User-perceived quality of experience (QoE) is critical as mobile video streaming experiences a substantial growth. User's demands are becoming diversified where accelerated playback is the preference of a considerable part of users. However, the limited and fluctuate mobile bandwidth is often not capable of satisfying user's demand of watching video at 2x or higher speed because of consequential frequent rebuffering. Previous adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms hardly consider the variety of user playback rates. In this work, we fully exploit the relation between user-perceived, i.e., subjective video quality and the characteristic of video content. The result of our motivational experiments shows that viewers are less sensitive to the bitrate variation and playback rate alternation if there is higher degree of motion in the video. With above guidelines, we adaptively adjust the quality configuration and playback rate to significantly reduce the rebuffering while achieving similar or even higher subjective quality. Then we formulate subjective quality and playback rate adaption as a QoE maximization problem and propose the content based subjective quality and playback rate adaptation algorithm (CSP) utilizing Lyapunov optimization technique. Via rigorous proof, the time-average QoE achieved by CSP is in O(1/V) gap compared to optimal value, where V is the control parameter. Extensive evaluations confirm the superiority of our proposed algorithm over other state-of-the-art algorithms under both normal and accelerated playback rate.