Content-centric Display Energy Management for Mobile Devices

While active studies have been conducted to reduce the power consumption of display-related components of mobile devices, previous work has rarely approached the issues without having to deteriorate graphical quality. In this paper, we propose an effective scheme to reduce display energy consumption without compromising user experience. We first define a metric called the content rate from which an appropriate refresh rate is determined for displaying content. The proposed system then sets an optimal refresh rate based on the content rate. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system effectively reduces the total power in commercial smartphones, yet the display quality is satisfactorily maintained.