Power-Aware Video Decoding
Johan A. Pouwelse · 2001
Multimedia applications targeting battery-operated wearable devices must be power-aware to exploit the capabilities of variable voltage processors. This paper presents a feedback (FB) controller for video decoding that regulates the voltage for individual frames. The decoding complexity of (parts of) individual frames is estimated using a simple frame length- decoding time correlation obtained from statistics gathered on the target hardware (StrongARM processor). Experiments with a modified H.263 decoder show that the FB controller closely approaches ( 10%) the optimal case in which each frame is decoded at the minimal frequency/voltage. Furthermore, we observe that incorporating additional complexity information in the video stream will only be useful when the energy consumption of the (fixed) memory subsystem is significantly reduced. 1.