  Mobile streaming video data accounts for a large and increasing percentage of
wireless network traffic. The available bandwidths of modern wireless networks
are often unstable, leading to difficulties in delivering smooth, high-quality
video. Streaming service providers such as Netflix and YouTube attempt to adapt
their systems to adjust in response to these bandwidth limitations by changing
the video bitrate or, failing that, allowing playback interruptions
(rebuffering). Being able to predict end user' quality of experience (QoE)
resulting from these adjustments could lead to perceptually-driven network
resource allocation strategies that would deliver streaming content of higher
quality to clients, while being cost effective for providers. Existing
objective QoE models only consider the effects on user QoE of video quality
changes or playback interruptions. For streaming applications, adaptive network
strategies may involve a combination of dynamic bitrate allocation along with
playback interruptions when the available bandwidth reaches a very low value.
Towards effectively predicting user QoE, we propose Video Assessment of
TemporaL Artifacts and Stalls (Video ATLAS): a machine learning framework where
we combine a number of QoE-related features, including objective quality
features, rebuffering-aware features and memory-driven features to make QoE
predictions. We evaluated our learning-based QoE prediction model on the
recently designed LIVE-Netflix Video QoE Database which consists of practical
playout patterns, where the videos are afflicted by both quality changes and
rebuffering events, and found that it provides improved performance over
state-of-the-art video quality metrics while generalizing well on different
datasets. The proposed algorithm is made publicly available at
http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/Quality/VideoATLAS release_v2.rar.
