Real-Time Low Power Software HEVC Decoder on Embedded GPP: A Side-by-Side Comparison

Video on mobile devices is a must-have feature with the prominence of new video-centric services and applications such as streaming or conferencing. By improving the compression performance by a factor of two with a similar image quality, the new video standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is an appealing technology for service providers. Besides, with the recent progress of Systems-on-Chip (SoC) for mobile devices, software video decoders are now a reality. They offer a high flexibility of implementation as well as a means to rapidly deploy HEVC on existing devices without waiting for compatible hardware solutions. In this context, a challenge is to design a power efficient system that fits the compelling demand for long battery life on mobile devices. In this demo, a subjective evaluation of a low power HEVC decoder is presented on a big.LITTLE ARM-based embedded development platforms. It shows the performance of a standard compliant decoding system versus a low power decoding system in a side-by-side format on two 9-inch displays. Power savings close to 7% have been demonstrated on the whole energy consumption of a mobile device by using low power decoding.