A modified HEVC decoder for low power decoding

Abstract

The increasing prominence of video oriented services, such as video conferencing, streaming or sharing, over other Internet services has made video decoding a must-have feature for any consumer device. As a complex signal processing task, video decoding puts a high pressure on battery-driven devices since battery autonomy becomes a key performance indicator for a device. In a near future, HEVC video compression standard is to replace H.264 as the dominating standard since it doubles video compression rates for the same subjective image quality, widening the scope of video applications. In this paper, a modified HEVC decoder is proposed within the context of MPEG Green Metadata. This decoder fosters energy-efficient implementations on embedded systems. Experiments show that without changing the incoming bitstream, a software implementation of the modified decoder can save up to 28% of energy while introducing limited distortion.