Quality of Experience (QoE) in Cloud Gaming: A Comparative Analysis of Deep Learning Techniques via Facial Emotions in a Virtual Reality Environment

• DOI: 10.3390/s25051594
• Publication Date: 2025-03-05T12:56:52Z
• Authors: Awais Khan Jumani; Jinglun Shi; Asif Ali Laghari; Muhammad Ahmad Amin; Aftab ul Nabi; Kamlesh Narwani; Yi Zhang

Cloud gaming has rapidly transformed the gaming industry, allowing users to play games on demand from anywhere without the need for powerful hardware. Cloud service providers are striving to enhance user Quality of Experience (QoE) using traditional assessment methods. However, these traditional methods often fail to capture the actual user QoE because some users are not serious about providing feedback regarding cloud services. Additionally, some players, even after receiving services as per the Service Level Agreement (SLA), claim that they are not receiving services as promised. This poses a significant challenge for cloud service providers in accurately identifying QoE and improving actual services. In this paper, we have compared our previous proposed novel technique that utilizes a deep learning (DL) model to assess QoE through players’ facial expressions during cloud gaming sessions in a virtual reality (VR) environment. The EmotionNET model technique is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. Later, we have compared the EmotionNET technique with three other DL techniques, namely ConvoNEXT, EfficientNET, and Vision Transformer (ViT). We trained the EmotionNET, ConvoNEXT, EfficientNET, and ViT model techniques on our custom-developed dataset, achieving 98.9% training accuracy and 87.8% validation accuracy with the EmotionNET model technique. Based on the training and comparison results, it is evident that the EmotionNET model technique predicts and performs better than the other model techniques. At the end, we have compared the EmotionNET results on two network (WiFi and mobile data) datasets. Our findings indicate that facial expressions are strongly correlated with QoE.