Worst Case Driven Display Frame Compression for Energy-Efficient Ultra-HD Display Processing

Display frame compression is an effective technique to address the challenge of external memory access in ultrahigh definition video display system. Nevertheless, previously proposed display frame compression designs are inadequate in terms of either energy efficiency or throughput. This paper aims to exploit the algorithm and very large scale integration (VLSI) architecture of a worst case driven display frame compression. By using a prediction-and-compression framework and a semi-fixed length coding scheme, the proposed design can achieve the much better balance between compression efficiency and throughput, and substantially reduce the bandwidth requirement and energy consumption of external memory system in the meanwhile. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed display frame compression achieves 5.7-dB peak signal-to-noise ratio improvement, 3.1% compression ratio reduction, 3 × throughput, and 66.4% hardware cost saving, compared with the best previous work. In addition, the proposed VLSI design can support the throughput of 4 K × 2 K@60 Hz and reduce at least 17.6% energy consumption of external memory system by exploiting dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, compared with conventional display frame compression works.