Dynamic Voltage Scaling Using Scene Change Detection for Video Playback on Mobile AMOLED Displays

Due to a high contrast ratio, a wide color gamut, and thinness and flexibility, Active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) displays are widely used in mobile devices like smartphones. But frequent user interactions and limited battery capacity make low-power approaches highly required in AMOLED displays more and more. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) method based on scene change detection for video playback on a mobile AMOLED display panel. This method first employs the entropies of Y, Cb, and Cr components in the YCbCr color space for macroblocks in each video frame to detect the scene change and determine when to do DVS. And then it associates the luminance with the Y component and extracts the relationship between Cb and Cr components and the supply voltage to the display panel to determine how much to do DVS. We implemented this method for an MPEG4/H.264 player on an evaluation board with a mobile AMOLED display panel. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves on average 19.7% power saving compared to the original video on an AMOLED display. Also, the proposed algorithm recovered the luminance of the AMOLED display from 93% to 96%.