VidPlat: A Tool for Fast Crowdsourcing of Quality-of-Experience Measurements

Abstract

For video or web services, it is crucial to measure user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) at scale under various video quality or page loading delays. However, fast QoE measurements remain challenging as they must elicit subjective assessment from human users. Previous work either (1) automates QoE measurements by letting crowdsourcing raters watch and rate QoE test videos or (2) dynamically prunes redundant QoE tests based on previously collected QoE measurements. Unfortunately, it is hard to combine both ideas because traditional crowdsourcing requires QoE test videos to be pre-determined before a crowdsourcing campaign begins. Thus, if researchers want to dynamically prune redundant test videos based on other test videos' QoE, they are forced to launch multiple crowdsourcing campaigns, causing extra overheads to re-calibrate or train raters every time. This paper presents VidPlat, the first open-source tool for fast and automated QoE measurements, by allowing dynamic pruning of QoE test videos within a single crowdsourcing task. VidPlat creates an indirect shim layer between researchers and the crowdsourcing platforms. It allows researchers to define a logic that dynamically determines which new test videos need more QoE ratings based on the latest QoE measurements, and it then redirects crowdsourcing raters to watch QoE test videos dynamically selected by this logic. Other than having fewer crowdsourcing campaigns, VidPlat also reduces the total number of QoE ratings by dynamically deciding when enough ratings are gathered for each test video. It is an open-source platform that future researchers can reuse and customize. We have used VidPlat in three projects (web loading, on-demand video, and online gaming). We show that VidPlat can reduce crowdsourcing cost by 31.8% - 46.0% and latency by 50.9% - 68.8%.