Power and content aware video encoding for video communication over wireless networks

In the highly versatile next-generation wireless networks, a fundamental problem is how to manage power consumption efficiently while preserving high quality performance. The paper addresses power-and-content-aware video encoding in pervasive wireless/mobile environments. We formulate the problem of video quality maximization while preserving the battery power of the underlying device as an optimization problem. This is equivalent to minimizing both the power consumption and video distortion simultaneously. Based on a complexity scalable video coding architecture and content aware adjustment, we propose a software based compression scheme. We call the proposed encoder active because it best uses its bits and power and tunes its parameters accordingly. The preliminary results show that the encoder determines a suitable configuration according to the coding environment in order to save power and maintain well-perceived video quality.