The influence of content, task and sensory interaction on multimedia quality perception

Human sensory interaction plays an important (but not yet fully understood) role in determining how individuals interact with the world around them. There are numerous types of sensory interaction and this paper examines the interaction of the auditory and visual senses for viewers of multimedia systems. This paper addresses two questions: first, does perception of quality in one modality affect the perception of quality in the other modality and, second, does focusing attention towards one modality affect the viewer's ability to detect errors in the other modality? The perception of audio quality and video quality are closely linked for certain multimedia content. To investigate this relationship, two experiments were conducted where participants were presented with multimedia content where varying distortion had been introduced into both the auditory and visual streams. Participants were asked to state their opinion of the audio, video or overall quality using a standardized scale. Results and subsequent statistical analysis showed that subjective audio quality varied with the video quality and vice versa. Furthermore, when a participant was attending to just one modality, they were less sensitive to reduced quality in the other modality.