A Testing Apparatus for Faster and More Accurate Subjective Assessment of Quality of Experience in Cloud Gaming

The number of cloud gaming (CG) users is constantly growing. The idea in cloud gaming is to render the game events on a cloud server and stream the resulted scenes as a video sequence to players. CG requires a high bandwidth in order to run appropriately and create a good quality of experience for players. In order to reduce the high required bandwidth, video should be compressed without any negative impact on user's quality of experience (QoE). Thus CG providers, researchers who develop new compression methods for CG, and those who are improving network protocols for CG require to evaluate user experience using subjective methods. Over the years, many researches have investigated the subjective quality of video, but all of them have one of the following two main drawbacks, which makes them unsuitable for game videos. The subjective quality assessment methods which are designed for short duration video sequences suffer from Forgiveness and Recency effects. On the other hand, the methods which are designed for long duration video sequences usually use some sort of a handset device for rating scores, and hence cannot be used for most games where both hands are busy while playing. In this paper, a novel subjective test apparatus for assessment of game videos is proposed, where players give their opinion scores using a foot pedal while playing the game. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed scheme is more accurate and less distractive than existing methods.