Joint power and distortion control in video coding

For video coding in futuristic ubiquitous environments, how to efficiently manage the power consumption while preserving high video quality is crucial. To address the above challenge, we formulate a multiple objective optimization problem to model the behavior of power-distortion-optimized video coding. The objectives in this problem are incommensurate and in conflict with one another. By assessing the performance trade-offs as well as the collective impact of power and distortion, we propose a joint power-distortion control strategy (JPDC), in which the power and distortion are jointly considered. After the analysis on the approach of solving the problem statically, we utilize a suboptimal "greedy" approach in the JPDC scheme. Each complexity parameter is adjusted individually. The system starts coding at the highest complexity level, and will automatically migrate to lower/higher level until the performance improvement gets saturated, leading to the optimal operation point. We perform simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Our results show that the proposed JPDC scheme is aware of the power constraint as well as the video content, and achieves significant power savings with well-perceived video quality. Such a feature is particularly desirable in futuristic video applications.