Advanced Design Space Exploration for Joint Energy and Quality Optimization for VVC

TL;DR

This paper presents an advanced design space exploration method for VVC that significantly reduces energy consumption while maintaining high video quality, by optimizing coding tool profiles and employing novel algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces new optimization strategies and a minimization criterion to improve energy efficiency and rate-distortion performance in VVC encoding.

Findings

Up to 47% energy reduction with less than 30% bit rate increase

Over 35% energy savings with about 6% additional bit rate

Enhanced Pareto front for energy and quality trade-offs

Abstract

In recent studies, it could be shown that the energy demand of Versatile Video Coding (VVC) decoders can be twice as high as comparable High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) decoders. A significant part of this increase in complexity is attributed to the usage of new coding tools. By using a design space exploration algorithm, it was shown that the energy demand of VVC-coded sequences could be reduced if different coding tool profiles were used for the encoding process. This work extends the algorithm with several optimization strategies, methodological adjustments to optimize perceptual quality, and a new minimization criterion. As a result, we significantly improve the Pareto front, and the rate-distortion and energy efficiency of the state-of-the-art design space exploration. Therefore, we show an energy demand reduction of up to 47% with less than 30% additional bit rate, or a reduction of over 35% with approximately 6% additional bit rate.