Energy Efficient Video Decoding for VVC Using a Greedy Strategy-Based Design Space Exploration

Abstract

IP traffic has increased significantly in recent years, and it is expected that this progress will continue. Recent studies report that the viewing of online video content accounts for a share of 1 % of the global greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce the data traffic of video streaming, the new standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC) has been finalized in 2020. In this paper, the energy efficiency of two different VVC decoders is analyzed in detail. Furthermore, we propose a design space exploration that uses an algorithm based on a greedy strategy to derive coding tool profiles that optimize the energy demand of the decoder. We show that the algorithm derives optimal coding tool profiles for a subset of coding tools. Additionally, we propose profiles that reduce the energy demand of VVC decoders and provide energy savings of more than 50 % for sequences with 4K resolution. Thereby, we will also show that the proposed profiles can have a lower decoding energy demand than comparable HEVC-encoded bit streams while also having a significantly lower bit rate.

Optimized Decoding-Energy-Aware Encoding In Practical VVC Implementations

“…We performed the energy measurements on a desktop PC with an Intel i7-8700 CPU using its integrated power meter, Running Average Power Limit (RAPL). Due to the influence of noise and background processes, we perform a series of measurements and validate the results with a confidence interval test for statistical correctness as described in [13]. As parameters for the confidence interval, we chose α = 0.99 and β = 0.01.…”

“…Evaluated configurations on top of VVenC medium. EE represents the reduced CTP according to [13]. The CTP configurations v2-v8 try to compensate the bitrate loss of EE with minimal decoding energy increase.…”

“…For bitrate efficiency evaluation of a coding tool profile (CTP), which indicates the usage of each coding tool during encoding [13], we use the commonly used Bjøntegaard Delta (BD) metric. In this work, we refer Bjøntegaard Delta Bitrate (BDR) to the bit rate increase/savings for the same PSNRYUV level.…”

“…Furthermore, we use the Bjøntegaard Delta Decoding Energy (BDDE) to evaluate the impact of the decoding energy demand for the same PSNRYUV level, correspondingly. For the calculation of BDDE, we substitute the bitrate with the decoding energy demand as was done in [13]. For each BD metric in this work, the reference is the medium preset of VVenC.…”

“…One branch of this research targets the optimization of the decoder energy consumption, where several methods optimizing the decoding complexity were proposed for HEVC [9,10,11]. Recently, with the standardization of the next-generation video codec VVC, approaches to reduce the energy consumption of the VVC decoder were developed and analyzed in detail [12,13]. These methods exploit the encoder configuration to reduce the decoder's energy consumption.…”