A constant rate bandwidth reduction architecture with adaptive compression mode decision for video decoding

The high definition video capture and playback is becoming increasingly popular in battery-operated handheld devices. Video coding standards like H.264/AVC achieves high coding efficiency but increases the system power consumption which is limited for battery-operated devices. This paper proposes a new adaptive external memory bandwidth reduction scheme to reduce power consumption. An efficient memory organization and a variable length coding scheme is embedded in this scheme. Moreover, an adaptive compression strategy is proposed to adaptively choose the best mode for reference frame compression. The adaptive mode decision unit optimizes the compression mode according to the bandwidth availabilities and image pattern complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves up to 70% bandwidth savings with 1~2dB image quality losses.