Compact Visual Data Representation for Green Multimedia -- A Human Visual System Perspective

TL;DR

This paper surveys how insights from the Human Visual System can inspire ultra-compact, energy-efficient visual data representations for sustainable multimedia, emphasizing knowledge extraction over signal reconstruction.

Contribution

It introduces recent research on green multimedia representation inspired by the Human Visual System and discusses future directions for sustainable visual data processing.

Findings

HVS enables ultra-compact visual data compression

Deep understanding of HVS can improve green multimedia technologies

Survey highlights recent efforts in sustainable visual data representation

Abstract

The Human Visual System (HVS), with its intricate sophistication, is capable of achieving ultra-compact information compression for visual signals. This remarkable ability is coupled with high generalization capability and energy efficiency. By contrast, the state-of-the-art Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard achieves a compression ratio of around 1,000 times for raw visual data. This notable disparity motivates the research community to draw inspiration to effectively handle the immense volume of visual data in a green way. Therefore, this paper provides a survey of how visual data can be efficiently represented for green multimedia, in particular when the ultimate task is knowledge extraction instead of visual signal reconstruction. We introduce recent research efforts that promote green, sustainable, and efficient multimedia in this field. Moreover, we discuss how the deep understanding of the HVS can benefit the research community, and envision the development of future green multimedia technologies.