Optimal design of JPEG hardware under the approximate computing paradigm

JPEG compression based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is a key building block in low-power multimedia applications. We use approximate computing to exploit the error tolerance of JPEG and formulate a novel optimization problem that maximizes power savings under an error budget. We analyze the error propagation sensitivity in the DCT network and use this information to model the impact of introduced errors on the output quality. Simulations show up to 15% reduction in area and delay which corresponds to 40% power savings at iso-delay.