Joint Power-Distortion Optimization on Devices with MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Codec

Energy supply is always a bottleneck in wireless video applications. To prolong the battery life, a typical wireless video encoding and streaming system should have the capability of dynamically adjusting its encoding parameters based on the remaining battery supply. In this paper, we consider two types of application scenarios as well as the associated optimization problems. The first one is, given a video quality level, how to find out the optimized encoding parameters so that the total power consumption is minimized. The second one is, given a fixed power consumption level, how to calculate the optimized encoding parameters so that the video quality is best. Accordingly, we jointly consider the power consumption and video quality and pose the above two problems into a uniform optimization framework. Under this framework, we give an efficient solution for the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 codec and Wi-Fi transmission devices based on a detailed complexity analysis of the H.264 encoder. The analysis method can be easily extended to other video encoder and transmission configuration.