Energy Efficient Video Decoding for VVC Using a Greedy Strategy Based Design Space Exploration

TL;DR

This paper presents a greedy strategy-based design space exploration to optimize energy efficiency in VVC video decoding, achieving over 50% energy savings and lower bit rates compared to HEVC.

Contribution

It introduces a novel greedy algorithm for deriving energy-efficient coding profiles for VVC decoders, demonstrating significant energy savings and improved performance.

Findings

Energy savings of over 50% for 4K sequences.

Proposed profiles can outperform HEVC in energy demand.

The algorithm finds optimal coding tool profiles for subsets of tools.

Abstract

IP traffic has increased significantly in recent years, and it is expected that this progress will continue. Recent studies report that the viewing of online video content accounts for a share of 1% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce the data traffic of video streaming, the new standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC) has been finalized in 2020. In this paper, the energy efficiency of two different VVC decoders is analyzed in detail. Furthermore, we propose a design space exploration that uses an algorithm based on a greedy strategy to derive coding tool profiles that optimize the energy demand of the decoder. We show that the algorithm derives optimal coding tool profiles for a subset of coding tools. Additionally, we propose profiles that reduce the energy demand of VVC decoders and provide energy savings of more than 50% for sequences with 4K resolution. Thereby, we will also show that the proposed profiles can have a lower decoding energy demand than comparable HEVC-encoded bit streams while also having a significantly lower bit rate.