Subjective Assessment of BitDetect—A Mechanism for Energy-Aware Multimedia Content Adaptation

As mobile devices are becoming more compact and powerful and as they start to be increasingly used for accessing power-hungry multimedia streaming applications, there is an increasing need for mechanisms to efficiently manage the limited battery power resources. This is especially important as the battery capacity has not kept up with the power requirements of an increasing number of mobile device features and “always on” connected users. Adaptive multimedia-based power-saving mechanisms often decrease the clip bitrate to increase the mobile device battery life, without considering the effect of these degradations on the user-perceived quality. This paper proposes BitDetect, a mechanism that uses objective video quality assessment metrics to detect content-specific video bitrate levels that enable saving battery power while maintaining good user perceived quality. Results from a subjective study indicate that the recommended bitrate offers good user-perceived quality across different multimedia clips. Furthermore, experimental tests indicate that significant battery power can be saved by using the recommended bitrates when streaming multimedia clips to a mobile device.