Power-scalable video encoder for mobile devices based on collocated motion estimation
Joël Jung, Arnaud Bourge · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
In this paper, a method for designing low-power video schemes is presented. Algorithms that imply a very low dissipation are required for new applications where the energy source is limited, e.g. mobile phones including a camera and video features. Whereas it can be observed that video standards are mainly designed around coding efficiency, we propose to take into account power consumption characteristics directly when designing the algorithm. More precisely, we give some guidelines for the design of low-power video codecs in the scope of modern hardware architectures and we introduce the notion of power scalability. We present an original encoder based on so-called 'Collocated Motion Estimation' designed using the proposed methodology. Experimental results show that we remain close to the coding efficiency of the reference H.264 baseline encoder while the power consumption is largely reduced in our solution. Moreoever this encoder is scalable in memory transfer and computational complexity.