Power-rate-distortion modeling for energy minimization of portable video encoding devices

In portable multimedia devices, one of the most critical issues is to minimize the energy consumption and thereby prolong the operational lifetime of the system while maintaining the required video quality. In this paper, we proposed a power-rate-distortion (P-R-D) model of video encoding system to maximize its lifetime. The proposed P-R-D model of video encoder is generated in two steps. The first step is the modeling process of the relationship between the power consumption and the distortion of video encoder. For this, we developed a power consumption model of a video encoder based on a power-scalable architecture of H.264/AVC encoder using the power consumption data of each functional module. The second step is generating the unified P-R-D model based on the P-D model and the conventional rate-distortion (R-D) model. Experimental results show that the proposed P-R-D model describes the relationship among power, rate, and distortion with 0.99 of the R-square value on the average.