Low-Power Video Decoding on Variable Voltage Processor for Mobile Multimedia Applications

This paper proposes a novel low-power video decoding scheme. In the encoded video bitstream, there is quite a large number of non-coded blocks. When the number of the non-coded blocks in a frame is known at the start of frame decoding, the workload of the video decoding can be estimated. Consequently, the supply voltage of very large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits can be lowered, and the power consumption can be reduced. In the proposed scheme, the encoder counts the number of non-coded blocks and stores this information in the frame header of the bitstream. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the power consumption to about 1/10 to 1/20.