Energy-constrained real-time H.264/AVC video coding

Abstract

Energy consumption has become a leading design constraint for computing devices in order to defray electric bills for individuals and businesses. Over the past years, digital video communication technologies have demanded higher computing power availability and, therefore, higher energy expenditure. In order to meet the challenge to provide software-based video encoding solutions, we adopted an open source software implementation of an H.264 video encoder, the x264 encoder, and optimized its prediction stage in the energy sense (E). Thus, besides looking for the coding options which lead to the best coded representation in terms of rate and distortion (RD), we constrain the process to fit within a certain energy budget. i.e., an RDE optimization. We considered energy as the time integration of the real demanded electric power for a given system. We present an RDE-optimized framework which allows for software-based real-time video compression, meeting the desired targets of electrical consumption, hence, controlling carbon emissions. We show results of energy-constrained compression wherein one can save as much as 35% of the energy with small impact on RD performance.