Quality assessment method for multiparty audiovisual communication services

This paper clarifies the effects of multiparty audiovisual communication quality factors - the quality imbalance and conversation roles - on overall quality and proposes a method of estimating overall quality taking them into account. First, we focused on packet loss and delay as quality degradation factors and performed a subjective quality assessment. The results showed that the overall quality at a given point is strongly influenced by inferior quality at other points and that the conversation roles influence the overall quality. Validation test results verified that the overall quality was estimated by the proposed method with sufficient accuracy for practical use. As a guideline for quality management and control for multiparty audiovisual communication, we show that improving the inferior other-point quality is an effective way to improve the overall quality.