Low power digital video compression hardware design

Abstract

There is tremendous growth in the amount of digital video creation and communication with the proliferation of mobile consumer electronic devices such as cellular phones with video capture and display capabilities. This trend will continue with the demand for higher spatial and temporal video resolutions accompanied by 3D and multiview video. Since it is not practical to store or transmit the raw digital video data, it is essential to reduce it with digital video compression. To cope with the vast amount of raw digital video data, digital video compression standards use increasingly more complex algorithms. These algorithms achieve higher compression at the same quality at the expense of significant computational complexity. Therefore, it is essential to design low power digital video compression hardware especially for mobile devices. In this talk, I will present two sets of power reduction techniques for digital video compression hardware. The ones in the first set reduce the power consumption with no impact on the video quality. The ones in the second set trade off video quality for power consumption which also enables adjusting video quality based on available energy in the battery of a mobile device for graceful degradation. I will show the impact of these techniques on the power consumption of digital video compression hardware implementing H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC standards.