Improving Our Everyday Perceptual Experience
The amount of multimedia digital content at our disposal (such as videos, images and audio) has exploded in recent years. It is constantly streamed to millions of TVs, tablets, laptops and smartphones around the world. In fact, multimedia content is what shapes the Internet as we know it. A key challenge facing both the research community and industry is how to provide innovative solutions that will enrich and enhance human experiences when we consume this content.
Since human perceptual systems (such as our visual and auditory systems) ultimately determine how we react to and experience such content, designing multimedia creation, distribution and presentation systems that optimize the perceptual quality-of-experience for users is critical. As Canada Research Chair in Multimedia Quality-of-Experience, Dr. Zhou Wang is developing computational models that can automatically predict and optimize human visual quality-of-experience when consuming multimedia content.
Wang has already helped invent the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), which assesses perceptual visual quality. It has been widely used in the broadcasting and telecommunications industry to monitor and optimize the quality of video delivered to millions of users on a daily basis.
Now, Wang and his research team are using revolutionary, biologically inspired perceptual modelling and viewer intelligence approaches to develop new theories and technologies for end-to-end multimedia quality-of-experience measurement, optimization and intelligence solutions. These have the potential to reshape how multimedia content is processed, distributed and presented over communication networks. Ultimately, they will also improve individuals’ everyday perceptual experiences.