Power-Aware HEVC Decoding with Tunable Image Quality

Erwan Nogues (1) , Simon Holmbacka (2) , Maxime Pelcat (1) , Daniel Menard (1) , Johan Lilius (2)

1 IETR - Institut d'Électronique et des Technologies du numéRique
2 Åbo Academy University

A high pressure is put on mobile devices to support increasingly advanced applications requiring more processing capabilities. Among those, the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) provides a better video quality for the same bit rate than the previous H.264 standard. A limitation in the usability of a mobile video playing device is the lack of support for guaranteeing stand-by time and up time for battery driven devices. The Green Metadata initiative within the MPEG standard was launched to address the power saving issues of the decoder and defines the technology requirements. In this paper, we propose a HEVC decoder with tunable decoding quality levels for maximum power savings as suggested in the scope of the Green Metadata initiative. Our experiments reveal that the modified HEVC video decoder can save up to 28 % of power consumption in real-world platforms while keeping better quality than decoding with H.264.

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Erwan Nogues, Simon Holmbacka, Maxime Pelcat, Daniel Menard, Johan Lilius. Power-Aware HEVC Decoding with Tunable Image Quality. IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Systems, Oct 2014, Belfast, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-01078566⟩