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Energy-Aware Video Encoding for Image Quality Improvement in Battery-Operated Surveillance Camera
Younghoon Lee, Jungsoo Kim, Student Member, IEEE, and Chong-Min Kyung, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractGrowing needs for surveillance in locations without power lines necessitates the development of a surveillance camera with extremely low-power consumption and an assured stable operation until the time of expected run-out of available energy. This paper proposes an algorithm for scheduling of video encoding congurations in a battery-operated surveillance system to reduce the image distortion while assuring the sustained operation until the battery recharge/exchange. The optimal video encoding conguration is determined based on the amount of estimated remaining event duration (considering the uncertainty of events) and remaining battery charge (considering the rate-capacity and recovery effect). The proposed algorithm consists of two steps: design-time step and run-time step. In the design-time step, prediction of remaining event duration, called duration prediction, is performed considering the uncertainty of events and tradeoff between encoding power and image quality. During run-time, video encoding conguration is switched between intra-frame encoding and inter-frame encoding based on the duration prediction obtained in design-time step and the remaining battery charge measured in run-time step. Compared to the conventional method based on the most conservative duration prediction [5], experimental results show that the proposed method provides 2.24~3.78 dB improvement in the image quality (in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio in the H.264 encoding of four video sequences while satisfying the battery constraint. Index TermsBattery, surveillance camera, uncertainty, video encoding.

I. INTRODUCTION

O MEET the growing demands on public security against crimes, accidents, and disasters, it is necessary to enhance monitoring functions in places even without power lines, which, in turn, depends on the availability of battery-operated video camera with very low cost and power consumption. In such a battery-powered surveillance system, energy management becomes a very critical issue. The primary requirement of such surveillance system is to capture events of concern and inform the relevant personnel before the battery runs out. To extend
Manuscript received April 09, 2010; revised July 17, 2010; accepted December 04, 2010. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant 2010-0000823 funded by the Korea government (MEST). Y. Lee is with the Software Platform Laboratory, LG Electronics, Seoul 137130, Republic of Korea (e-mail:lyh1064@gmail.com). J. Kim and C.-M. Kyung are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 305701, Republic of Korea (e-mail:jskim@vslab.kaist.ac.kr; kyung@ee.kaist.ac. kr). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TVLSI.2010.2102055

the battery lifetime in the surveillance system until the battery replacement, it needs to be operated in an event-driven manner, i.e., the system captures events and encodes the images for storage and/or transmission when and only when the event is detected. However, duration and arrival time of an event is generally assumed to be uncertain [1]. Such uncertainties make it difcult to predict actual video encoding time and to nd the pareto-optimal (with respect to energy, distortion, and rate, according to the system specication) video encoding conguration. Conventional methods based on worst-case scenario are likely to waste energy, because the estimation of event duration is too conservative, i.e., each event is assumed to have the longest possible value [5]. In smart surveillance systems, video encoding conguration is selected among many encoding congurations with different distortion and energy consumption levels. In video encoding such as H.264 or MPEG4, the amount of distortion of a compressed video can be represented as a function of the amount of consumed energy when the bitrate [2] is constant. In [2], a power-scalable video encoding method is proposed to minimize the energy consumption in portable video communication devices. Such complexity control parameters as the number of sum of absolute difference (SAD) computations and fraction of skipped macro blocks are adjusted to provide a trade-off between the encoding complexity and the distortion level. High encoding complexity generally leads to low video distortion. On the other hand, in dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS)-enabled systems, increasing the number of frequency and voltage levels contributes to reduced energy consumption. In video encoding of smart surveillance systems, various complexity control parameters are adjusted to capture all events until the next battery recharge/replacement while maintaining the image distortion below a given level. When the remaining battery charge is small, captured events are encoded in a low-energy mode; otherwise high-energy mode is selected leading to low-distortion level. Using this power-scalable encoding method, we can schedule a sequence of encoding congurations to minimize overall distortion under any given battery charge constraints. Battery is not an ideal energy source. The amount of energy actually delivered to the load by battery depends not only on the available charge in the battery but also on the discharge current prole through the load. This is explained through the two nonlinear characteristics of battery: rate-capacity effect and recovery effect. Rate-capacity effect represents the dependency of the amount of energy delivered by a battery on the magnitude of

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Fig. 1. Target architecture of the surveillance camera consisting of sensor, event detector, video encoder, and memory; we implemented the system using LG XNOTE LW25 laptop such that event detector [16] and video encoder [17] as well as OS are running on Intel Core2Duo processor; the power of the system is delivered from two batteries connected in parallel with voltage level conversion using a DC-DC converter [18].

discharge current. The recovery effect reects the charge recovered when the discharge current is sufciently small. Due to the nonlinear behavior of battery, the total charge loss of the battery is generally different from the charge consumption by the load. Analytical battery models have been proposed for the nonlinear battery characteristics [9]. In this paper, we propose a scheme for determining the video encoding congurations to minimize the image distortion under the constraint of xed time-to-battery replacement. The proposed scheme considers the probabilistic characteristics of events and performs the prediction of remaining event duration called duration prediction which minimizes the total estimated image distortion until the battery replacement while guaranteeing that the scheduled list of events is completed. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II reviews related works. Section III presents the system model of our work. Section IV describes the problem denition and overall ow. Section V explains the battery-aware distortion minimization algorithm. Experiments results are given in Section VI followed by the conclusion. II. RELATED WORKS Several methods have been proposed to maximize the overall performance under energy constraints [3], [4] by switching among multiple operation modes each with different amount of energy consumption. [5] proposed reward maximization algorithm while satisfying the energy constraint and real-time constraint. Recently, [6] proposed an operation mode scheduling scheme to maximize the image quality considering probabilistic task execution time under energy constraints, with an assumption of xed event arrival time. A number of schemes have been proposed to reect and exploit the probabilistic event characteristic in reducing the energy consumption. In [7], runtime distribution-aware DVFS algorithm was proposed. This method analytically determines the performance level to minimize the energy consumption on a single processor. A heuristic DVFS algorithm was proposed for obtaining the optimal remaining workload which provides the minimal dynamic and leakage energy consumption [8]. However, none of these methods [3][8] have considered the nonlinear characteristics of battery.

Some battery models considering the nonlinear behavior of battery [9], [10] predict the total charge loss of battery to estimate the battery lifetime. Various battery-aware task scheduling methods were proposed [11][15] using the analytical battery model in [9] which reects the rate-capacity and recovery effects of battery. In [11] and [12], static task scheduling methods to maximize battery lifetime were described. In [13], effects of inserting idle periods were described with general guidelines for choosing between battery-aware management policy (considering the nonlinear battery characteristics) and energyaware management policy (without considering the nonlinear battery characteristics). However, these methods only consider the scheduling of tasks with xed arrival time and duration. This paper rst proposes analytical energy management scheme considering the two practically most important features in the design and operation of energy-aware surveillance camera systems, i.e., stochastic event characteristic and nonlinear battery behavior. To achieve this goal, we modeled the stochastic event characteristics as a probability distribution function (PDF), and then, present a scheme to scale video encoding complexity considering the statistical information of PDF and nonlinear battery behavior to obtain the best image quality. The key contribution of this paper lies in extracting the best video quality until the given timeline while exhausting the battery charge based on the most realistic battery charge model. III. SYSTEM MODEL In this section, we rst describe our target surveillance camera system (see Section III-A). Then, we present a model for power-quality relationship of video encoder (see Section III-B) and a battery model considering the nonlinear battery characteristics, i.e., rate-capacity and recovery effect (see Section III-C). A. Target System and Hardware Implementation We targeted at a battery-operated surveillance camera system which observes a specic location without moving. Fig. 1 illustrates our target surveillance camera system consisting of multiple functional blocks, i.e., sensor, event detector, video encoder, and memory. The main function of the system is to detect suspicious objects in its camera scope, and then store the video

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in memory. To avoid energy being consumed for recording uncritical events, our target system is operated in an event-driven manner where all functional blocks, except for an event detector, are normally power-gated and only wake up when an event is detected by the event detector. Only when an event is detected by an event detector, the image captured by a sensor is compressed by a video encoder to be stored into a memory. As shown in Fig. 1, we implemented the target system using LG XNOTE LW25 laptop whose processor supports DVFS.1 We implemented both of the event detector and the video encoder as software running on the processor in the laptop. For the event detector, we used background subtraction algorithm [16], which can be implemented in very low complexity. We used x264 [17], real-life software for H.264 encoder, as the video encoder whose complexity is scaled according to encoding conguration, e.g., search range, I-frame insertion period, etc. To reduce the power consumption of the processor using DVFS, we implemented a power manager in OS such that processor operating frequency is set as the ratio of the remaining number of clock cycles to the time-to-deadline as follows: (1) where and represent the number of clock cycles for evaluating the event occurrence and encoding a frame, respectively. Since the frequency level is discrete, we set the frequency at the lowest possible value, but not lower than the value calculated by (1) among the given set of discrete frequencies. The power of the system is supplied from two Li-Ion batteries connected in parallel for doubling battery capacity. Note that parallel connection of batteries is a typical conguration of battery to extend battery charge capacity where the number of batteries connected in parallel, i.e., battery charge capacity, is determined by the expected battery lifetime in a typical surveillance system. A buck converter is used as a DC-DC converter in order to match voltage levels between the output voltage of the battery and the input voltage of the target system [18]. B. Power-Quality Model A complexity-scalable video encoder can encode a video sequence with disparate encoding congurations. Image quality is generally improved as the complexity of video encoding conguration increases, where the complexity is dened as the average number of clock cycles to encode a frame [2].2 The increased complexity often leads to drastic increase in power consumption, especially in a DVFS-enabled system. Video encoding complexity can be controlled by adjusting various encoding parameters such as frame type (I/P/B-frame representing intra/predictive/bi-directional predictive frame), motion estimation scheme, and search range. In this work, instantaneous decoding refresh (IDR) period, i.e., number of
a battery-operated surveillance camera system, DVFS is the most powerful and popular technique used to reduce the energy consumption. Intel Core2Duo processor, which is used in our surveillance camera system for event detector and video encoder, can save a signicant amount of energy using DVFS. 2There can be some exceptional cases, i.e., poorly designed algorithms where the image quality deteriorates despite higher encoding complexity.
1In

TABLE I VIDEO ENCODING COMPLEXITY AND IMAGE QUALITY DATA ACCORDING TO IDR PERIOD AS OBTAINED FOR H.264 ENCODING (BIT-RATE: 2000 kb/s, FRAME-RATE: 15 fps, IMAGE: 1280 720 PEDESTRIAN [19])

P- or B-frames between two nearest I-frames, is chosen as the only encoding parameter for simplicity.3 In general, I-frame is associated with lower computational complexity and lower image quality than P- or B-frame. Thus, with more I-frames inserted during the event encoding, the complexity of the event encoding becomes lower while the image quality deteriorates. Table I shows the simulation result of the average per-frame video encoding complexity and the average image quality obtained by encoding 1280 720 Pedestrian video [19] for various IDR periods. The rst column shows the IDR period (in terms of the number of frames). The second to fourth columns represent the corresponding average image complexity (in 10 cycles, which is obtained by Performance Application Programming Interface (PAPI) [20]), average power consumption (in Watts), and the average image quality [in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)], respectively. The power consumption is measured from thermal and power microarchitecture simulator PTscalar [21] by conguring a target processor in PTscalar as the best-effort estimate of the processor in LG XNOTE LW25 laptop, i.e., Intel Core2Duo T7200 processor, using the parameters presented in [22]. As shown in Table I, the image quality as well as the encoding complexity and power increases as IDR period increases. Fig. 2 shows the relationship between image quality and power consumption for the case of encoding 1280 720 Pedestrian video [19]. -axis and -axis represent image quality (in PSNR), and the normalized encoding power consumption with respect to the power consumption when IDR period is set to 50 in Table I, respectively. Each dot in Fig. 2 represents a pair of the normalized power consumption and image quality obtained experimentally by varying the IDR period, which, in turn, affects the power consumption through the change of encoding complexity, as shown in Table I. We approximated the relationship between the image quality and the normalized power (solid line) through tting the dots to the following form: (2)
3Despite many other encoding parameters which can be used for controlling the trade-off between the produced image quality and required energy, we selected IDR period to show how remaining energy can be used to estimate the optimal level of image quality in a very simplistic manner. Extension to other parameters, e.g., motion vector search range, macro block mode selection, etc., should not be too difcult, but beyond the scope of this paper.

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linear charge loss, [9]. represents the amount of reprecharge consumed by the load system until time . sents the amount of charge loss due to nonlinear battery characteristics reecting both rate-capacity and recovery effect at time . can be expressed by quantizing the elapsed time into time steps and approximating the current within a time step as constant as follows: (6) with (7)

Fig. 2. Relationship between image quality (PSNR) and normalized power consumption with respect to the power consumption when IDR period equals 50, as obtained by tting points in Table I into (2) for 1280 720 Pedestrian [19].

(8) where and represent, respectively, the required battery dis, where charge current and the elapsed time at is the unit time step, and is a technical parameter depending on the battery characteristics. Cumulative nonlinear charge loss depends not only on the active current prole but also on the idle period because of the nonlinear charge recovery during the idle period [13]. Idle period denotes the time interval between active periods, where active period is dened as time interval during which current is discharged from battery. As shown in (8), the cumulative nonlinear , increases as time passes within each active pecharge loss, riod. Thus, the cumulative nonlinear charge loss becomes maximum at the end of each active period. We dene cumulative nonlinearity (having the dimension of time) at as as follows: (9) Cumulative nonlinearity represents the equivalent amount of time during which battery is assumed to be additionally discharged due to nonlinear charge loss, which depends on the pattern of active and idle periods. Fig. 3(a) shows the pattern of active period and idle period while Fig. 3(b) shows the corresponding cumulative nonlinearity. Each circle in Fig. 3(b) represents peak cumulative nonlinearity (PCN) denoted as for the th active period in the th region (region is dened in Section IV). With longer active period, the PCN at the end of active period becomes larger. Because idle period leads to charge recovery, longer idle period generally tends to lower the cumulative nonlinearity. IV. PROBLEM DEFINITION AND SOLUTION OVERVIEW Battery recharge time (BRT) is assumed to be xed in this work. Fig. 4(a) exemplies an event trace during a BRT which is divided into xed time intervals, each of which is called region. For instance, if BRT is xed as one week and each region is two hours long, the number of regions, , is 84 ( 24(hours/ day)/2(hours) 7(days)). In this work, we assumed that an event happens when suspicious objects are observed within a

where and represent the image quality (in PSNR) and the normalized power consumption of the encoding condition, reare curve tting parameters deterspectively. , , and mined by least-square tting. In Pedestrian video, the average (max.) tting error becomes minimal, i.e., 1.21% (2.17%) when , , and . Since the curve tting parameters are dependent on the video captured, more specically, amount of motion contained in the video [2], we need to nd the curve tting parameters at each video capture. The power is supplied from a battery with voltage level conversion using a DC-DC converter whose efciency is dened as follows: (3) and are the current and voltage of a processor, where respectively. and are the current discharged from a battery and battery output voltage, respectively. Assuming that and are constant at their nominal values,4 i.e., 3.6 V and 0.8 and using (3), in (2) can be expressed as a function of as follows: (4) where is a constant dened as (5) C. Battery Model , is calculated Total charge loss of battery until time , , and cumulative nonas the sum of actual charge loss,
4Even though output voltage of Li-Ion battery, V , ranges 3.0~4.2 V according to the remaining battery charge, we approximated that V is constant in order to reduce the solution complexity. As stated in [9], it is a reasonable assumption since the error in terms of estimated lifetime is less than 3%. In addition, as presented in [18], the efciency of DC-DC converter,  , is almost constant throughout the entire range of load current in a recently presented DC-DC converter by improving the efciency in the range of light load current.

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Fig. 5. Solution inputs: pdfs of (a) RAD and (b) PCN obtained from different event traces during BRT, and (c) relationship of image quality (in PSNR) with respect to battery discharge current.

Fig. 3. (a) Battery discharge current prole within a region shown as an alternating sequence of idle period and active period, each with varying duration. (b) Time prole, within a region, of cumulative nonlinearity with each circle denoting the PCN.

Fig. 6. Runtime solution: battery discharge current level of each region is quantized into levels to obtain the corresponding IDR period as the video encoding conguration.

Fig. 4. Event trace divided into region.

N xed time intervals, each of which is called

number of quantized level of . Fig. 5(c) shows the relationship of image quality (in PSNR) with respect to battery discharge current in (4). Based on the three inputs shown in Fig. 5, we determine the scheduling of video encoding conguration (IDR period in this work) to enhance the image quality under battery charge constraint. The proposed solution consists of design-time step and run-time step. In the design-time step, we nd the optimal du( ), for the th region such that ration prediction, , average of predicted cumulative image quality from the th is dened by region to the th region is maximized, where (10) In (10), denotes the image quality (in PSNR) recorded during the th region, which is a function of battery discharge current is during the th region, i.e., , as given in (4) and Fig. 5(c). the average of , the RAD of the th region. The probability distribution of is shown in Fig. 5(a). The runtime step of the proposed solution is shown in Fig. 6. In runtime, we determine the video encoding conguration, i.e., IDR period in this work, at the start of each region based on the duration prediction . The LUT translating the battery discharge current level to the IDR period in Fig. 6 is built from the relationship of the average power consumption versus IDR period in Table I, and the battery discharge current versus the average power consumption in (3). Once the video encoding conguration is determined, it is maintained until the end of the region. There are video encoding congurations each of which is mapped onto corresponding battery discharge current where represents the battery discharge current of the th video encoding conguration. Thus, video encoding conguration of the th region can be selected by determining the amount of battery discharge current , which is calculated as follows: (11)

camera scope, making the sum of absolute difference (SAD) between the captured image and background image larger than a predened threshold value, i.e., background subtraction [16]. Within each region, there is an alternating sequence of active and idle periods as shown in Fig. 4(a). The amount of active period, i.e., time duration of a single event is called event active duration (EAD), while the total amount of EAD within a region, which is calculated as the sum of EAD within a region, is called regional active duration (RAD). The event sequence of the th region is characterized with two stochastic parameters: 1) RAD and 2) probability distribution of the th region, denoted by function (pdf) of peak cumulative nonlinearity (PCN) of the th region, denoted by . Fig. 5 shows three types of input required in the proposed procedure. Fig. 5(a) and (b) show, respectively, pdf of RAD and different event traces PCN of the th region obtained from during BRT. Since the event trace of the th region has a stochastic temporal variation for each BRT, RAD, and PCN obdifferent event traces during BRT can be repretained from sented by pdfs shown in Fig. 5(a) and (b), respectively. Note where is the probability that corresponds to the th quantized level and is the where

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where represents the amount of remaining charge measured at the start of the th region. is the prediction of PCN of the th region (which is set to the average of PCNs of the th region in this work). Since represents the average nonlinear charge ) represents the amount of loss during the th region, ( average residual actual charge at the start of th region. Then, ), can we set so that the residual actual charge, i.e., ( be equally distributed in encoding the remaining events when the prediction of total event duration is . By rearranging the equation with respect to , we can express as shown in the right-hand side of (11), i.e., ratio of the remaining battery charge , to ( ) which is the effective remaining time reecting , is the nonlinearity effect. (In the ideal case with .) determined as In addition, to prevent the battery exhaustion before the end of a BRT, we check, at the start of each region , whether satises the following three constraints: (12)

duration predictions for regions and checking inequalities in (12)~(14) in running the proposed scheme is negligible compared to other functions such as video encoding and event detection. V. BATTERY-AWARE DISTORTION MINIMIZATION In this section, we describe a method to predict the duration to maximize the predicted cumulative image quality. In the rst case, we assume that the BRT is divided into only two regions and the RAD in each region is xed. We then consider the second case where the RAD in each region has a pdf. In the third case, whole BRT is divided into regions with the pdf of RAD of each region. A. Two Regions With RAD Given as Unit Function When two regions are cascaded with RAD of each region xed, the predicted cumulative image quality metric covering , can be dened and from the rst to the second region, i.e., calculated as follows: (15) and

(13) (14) which is used to represent We dene a new operator the maximum value of within the corresponding region, e.g., represents the maximum value of within the th region. First constraint (12) implies that has to be set such that the maximum charge consumed in the th region, i.e., sum of the actual and nonlinear charge loss when the total amount of RAD becomes the largest, must be less than the amount of residual charge, i.e., , even in the worst case, to prevent the system failure. The second constraint (13) requires that is set so that the amount of residual charge at the start of the th region must be larger than the sum of actual charge loss consumed by the th region and the minimum amount of charge required to )th to th region encode remaining events occurring from ( in the lowest power mode, i.e., . The third constraint (14) represents the specied range of the current level. If battery discharge current determined by (11) does not satisfy the constraints in inequalities (12)~(14), is adjusted to the minimum value the th quantized battery current level which satises the constraints in inequalities (12)~(14). After is determined, we nd corresponding video encoding conguration (i.e., IDR period, in this work) by accessing the pre-characterized LUT which stores the set of pairs (battery discharge current, IDR period) as shown in Fig. 6. The proposed solution causes hardware cost and power consumption. In our proposed scheme, additional hardware is required to store LUT for a set of pairs (battery discharge current, IDR period) shown in Fig. 6, and duration predictions for regions found in design time. However, it is negligible since are usually set to small numbers ( and both and in our experiment as mentioned in Section VI-A). The amount of power consumed for nding proper video encoding conguration, i.e., IDR period, by accessing the table storing

As presented in (11), the battery discharge current level can be expressed as follows:

(16) (17) where (18) By replacing and with (16) and (17) and normalizing to one, we can rearrange (15) as follows:

(19) We calculate the optimal event duration in each region in the , as presented in [7]. First, we dereverse order, i.e., . Since the second region is the last region in this termine case, we set as the worst-case RAD of the second region to prevent battery exhaustion when the worst case actually hapwhich maximizes in (19). Because pens. Then, we nd is set as the average peak cumulative nonlinearity (APCN) of each region, is a unit function in this case, and is already is the only unknown varidetermined to its worst-case RAD, is a concave function with respect to able in (19). In addition, , thereby, we can obtain which maximizes by nding a point where . The point can efciently be found using root-nding algorithm, e.g., bisection, NewtonRaphson method, etc. B. Two Regions With Probabilistic Distribution of RAD When RAD of each region has a probabilistic distribution as shown in Fig. 5(a), the predicted cumulative image quality can

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be calculated as the sum of (19) with respect to pdfs of RAD and , as follows: of two regions, i.e.,

(20) is the number of quantized levels of RAD, i.e., . is the probability of tting into the th quantized denote when and t into the th level. and th quantized levels, respectively. in (20) is also a concave function with respect to Because , we can obtain the global maximum point, at a point, , . where C. Regions With Probabilistic Distribution of Event Active Duration regions with RAD of each When BRT is partitioned into region represented by a pdf, optimal duration prediction of the th region ( ) can be obtained by nding a point which maximizes the predicted cumulative image quality from the th to is then calculated by summing , the th region, i.e., . using the pdf of RAD, from the th to the th region where

two batteries are connected in parallel while the battery and load system are connected by a dc-dc converter whose efciency ( ) is 0.8 [18]. We assumed that the battery recharge time (BRT) is 1000 min and is partitioned into 10 regions, thereby each region is 100 min ( 1000 min/10 regions) long. We applied the proposed method in four different scenarios which are classied according to event duration and occurrence: 1) Scenario 1: short-duration events occurring once in a while (e.g., parking lot or road crossing at night); 2) scenario 2: short-duration events occurring frequently (e.g., parking lot or road crossing in the daytime); 3) scenario 3: long-duration events occurring once in a while (e.g., desert or public cemetery at night); 4) scenario 4: long-duration events occurring frequently (e.g., desert or public cemetery in the daytime). We compared the following three schemes, all of which exploit nonlinear battery characteristics: WORST [5]: duration prediction as the sum of the worstcase RAD of all remaining regions; AVERAGE: duration prediction as the sum of average RAD of all remaining regions; DIST (proposed): duration prediction with exploiting probabilistic RAD. We compared the effectiveness of each scheme with the average of normalized measured cumulative image quality (in PSNR) with respect to the number of encoded frames (in short, measured cumulative image quality), which is calculated as (sum of image quality of all encoded frames)/(number of encoded frames). Since battery-unaware video encoding scheduling schemes lead to system failure due to battery exhaustion before BRT is completed, it is unfair to compare the effectiveness of battery-aware and battery-unaware methods. Therefore, in our experiment, we compared the effectiveness (in terms of measured cumulative image quality) of considering the distribution of event characteristics only among battery-aware video encoding conguration scheduling methods. B. Quality Improvement

(21) is obtained rst, followed by the sequence of obtaining each .5 , is , and so on, i.e.,

VI. EXPERIMENT A. Setup In our experiment, we used the target system presented in Section III-A. We used nine IDR periods each of which corresponds to different encoding power consumption and image quality level as shown in Table I. We used the battery-related parameters in [9], i.e., initial charge, , which equals to 40 375 in (6) (8). In our system, (mA-min) and
5The complexity to calculate (21) is ( 1 ) where and represent the number of quantized levels of RAD and regions, respectively. However, since it is calculated in design time as we mentioned in Section IV, the additional components required to be implemented in a target surveillance camera system are additional memory space to store duration predictions, i.e., f ... g, and a power manager shown in Fig. 1.

OR N

D ;D ; ;D

Table II shows the comparison of the measured cumulative image quality (in PSNR) and measured cumulative image distortion (in MSE) obtained by applying the three methods for the above-mentioned four scenarios. Compared with WORST and AVERAGE, the proposed distribution-aware method (DIST) gives 2.24~3.78 dB and 0.59~1.15 dB image quality improvement, which correspond to 40.32%~58.12% and 12.76%~23.28% reduction of image distortion in terms of image distortion (MSE), respectively. The reason for such signicant improvement can be analyzed with Fig. 7 which shows battery discharge current (rst row), measured cumulative image quality (shown as PSNR in the second row) of the encoded image until the corresponding time, and residual charge (shown as distortion (MSE) in the third row) obtained by applying WORST, AVERAGE, and DIST for the average case of Scenario 3, respectively. As shown in the rst row of Fig. 7(a), battery discharge current is set relatively low at the start of BRT while it is monotonically increasing as time goes on. Such an increasing battery discharge current schedule comes from conservative duration

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Fig. 7. Scheduling result for Scenario 3 where three rows represent battery discharge current (rst row), corresponding normalized cumulative image quality (second row), and residual charge (third row), respectively, obtained by applying: (a) WORST, (b) AVERAGE, and (c) DIST (proposed).

TABLE II COMPARISON OF IMAGE QUALITY AND DISTORTION RESULTS

prediction of the WORST. Since WORST sets duration prediction as the sum of the worst-case RAD of remaining regions, battery discharge current, which is inversely proportional to duration prediction as in (11), is set too low owing to the overestimation of the remaining event duration. At the end of each region, the amount of residual charge is larger than estimated at the start of the region, because actual RAD is smaller than the RAD based on the worst-case assumption. In the WORST scheme, to utilize the excess residual charge to improve the encoded image quality, the battery discharge current of the next region has to be increased. As a consequence, the measured cumulative image quality also monotonically increases as shown in the second row of Fig. 7(a). However, to satisfy the constraints on battery discharge current to prevent battery exhaustion, i.e., (12) and (13), the excess residual charge cannot be fully utilized as the amount of residual charge becomes smaller in later

regions, since high discharge current leads to large PCN which lowers the battery discharge current to meet the battery charge constraint. Thus, despite large excess residual charge in later regions, battery discharge current cannot be set sufciently high. In case of AVERAGE shown in Fig. 7(b), battery discharge current (the rst row) is almost even during a BRT. In contrast with WORST and AVERAGE, the proposed solution DIST sets battery discharge current in a decreasing fashion, i.e., battery discharge current is set high in the beginning and lowered as time goes on, as shown in Fig. 7(c). Since excess residual charge cannot be fully utilized in later regions, we set the discharge current sufciently high and set the video encoding conguration accordingly to obtain high video quality, in earlier regions where residual charge is much larger than PCN. As a consequence, in later regions, battery discharge current needs to be set lower than the other two methods due to

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LEE et al.: ENERGY-AWARE VIDEO ENCODING FOR IMAGE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN BATTERY-OPERATED SURVEILLANCE CAMERA 9

smaller residual charge. As the second row of Fig. 7(c) shows, in earlier regions, measured cumulative image quality obtained by DIST is higher than others while it slightly decreases as time goes on due to the decreasing battery discharge current schedule in DIST. As shown in the third row in Fig. 7(a)(c), the residual charge at the end of BRT of DIST is less than those of others since DIST can efciently utilize the battery charge by exploiting the nonlinear battery characteristics. VII. CONCLUSION In this paper, we proposed an analytical scheme for setting video encoding congurations that exploits stochastic event characteristics and nonlinear discharge behavior of battery in a battery-powered surveillance camera system. The proposed scheme predicts the remaining event active duration, which is used to set IDR period, such that the average image quality is maximized under the given battery energy constraints. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme yields 0.59~1.15 dB and 2.24~3.78 dB improvement in the image quality (in terms of PSNR) compared to average and worst-case prediction schemes, respectively, while satisfying the battery constraint. REFERENCES
[1] A. Harmpapur, L. Brown, J. Connell, N. Haas, M. Lu, H. Mearkl, S. Pankanti, A. Senior, C-F. Shu, and Y. Tian, S3-R1: The IBM smart surveillance system-release 1, in Proc. ETP, 2004, pp. 5962. [2] Z. He, W. Cheng, and X. Chen, Energy minimization of portable video communication devices based on power-rate-distortion optimization, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol., vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 596608, May 2008. [3] R. Kravets and P. Krishnan, Power management techniques for mobile communication, in Proc. IFIP VLSI-SoC, 2006, pp. 157168. [4] W. Yuan and K. Nahrstedt, Energy-efcient soft real-time CPU scheduling for mobile multimedia systems, in Proc. ACM Symp. Oper. Syst. Principles, 2003, pp. 149163. [5] C. Rusu, R. Melhem, and D. Mosse, Maximize rewards for real-time applications with energy constraints, ACM Trans. Embed. Comput., vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 537559, Dec. 2003. [6] W. Y. Lee, H. Kim, and H. Lee, Maximum-utility scheduling of operation modes with probabilistic task execution times under energy constraints, IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst., vol. 28, no. 9, pp. 15311544, Sep. 2009. [7] S. Hong, S. Yoo, H. Jin, K.-M. Choi, J.-T. Kong, and S.-K. Eo, Runtime distribution-aware dynamic voltage scaling, in Proc. ICCAD, 2006, pp. 587594. [8] S. Hong, S. Yoo, B. Bin, K.-M. Choi, S.-K. Eo, and T. Kim, Dynamic voltage scaling of supply and body bias exploiting software runtime distribution, in Proc. DATE, 2008, pp. 242247. [9] D. Rakhmatov, S. Vrudhula, and D. A. Wallach, A model for battery lifetime analysis for organizing applications on a pocket computer, IEEE Trans. Very Large Scale Integr. (VLSI) Syst., vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 10191030, Dec. 2003. [10] V. Rao, G. Singhal, A. Kumar, and N. Navat, Battery model for embedded systems, in Proc. VLSID, 2005, pp. 105110. [11] P. Chowdgury and C. Chakrabarti, Static task-scheduling algorithms for battery-powered DVS systems, IEEE Trans. Very Large Scale Integr. (VLSI) Syst., vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 226237, Feb. 2005. [12] S. Zhang, K. S. Chartha, and G. Konjevod, Near optimal battery-aware energy management, in Proc. ISLPED, 2009, pp. 249254. [13] R. Rao and S. Vrudhula, Battery optimization vs energy optimization: Which to choose and when?, in Proc. ICCAD, 2005, pp. 439445. [14] J. Luo and N. K. Jha, Battery-aware static scheduling for distributed real-time embedded systems, in Proc. DAC, 2001, pp. 444449. [15] C. Yuan, S. M. Reddy, I. Pomeranz, and B. M. Al-Hashimi, Batteryaware dynamic voltage scaling in multiprocessor embedded system, in Proc. ISCAS, 2005, pp. 616619. [16] A. Hampapur et al., Smart video surveillance exploring the concept of multiscale spatiotemporal tracking, IEEE Signal. Process. Mag., vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 3851, Mar. 2005. [17] X264, [Online]. Available: http://videolan.org/developers/x264.html

[18] J. Qahouq, O. Abdel-Rahman, L. Huang, and I. Batarseh, On load adaptive control of voltage regulators for power managed loads: Control schemes to improve converter efciency and performance, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 18061819, Sep. 2007. [19] VQEG, [Online]. Available: ftp://vqeg.its.bldrdoc.gov/ [20] PAPI, [Online]. Available: http:// icl.cs.utk.edu/papi [21] W. Liao et al., Temperature and supply voltage aware performance and power modeling at microarchitecture level, IEEE Trans. Comput.Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst., vol. 24, no. 7, pp. 10421053, Jul. 2005. [22] K. Puttaswamy and G. H. Loh, Thermal herding: Microarchitecture techniques for controlling hotspots in high-performance 3d-integrated processor, in Proc. HPCA, 2007, pp. 193204. Younghoon Lee received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 2008, the M.S. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea, in 2010. He is currently with Software Platform Laboratory, LG Electronics, Seoul, Republic of Korea. His research interests include dynamic power management and low power OS kernel design.

Jungsoo Kim (S06M11) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea, in 2005, and the unied course of the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KAIST, in 2010. He is currently with KAIST as a postdoc since 2010. His research interests include dynamic power and thermal management, MPSoC design, and low-power wireless surveillance system design.

Chong-Min Kyung (S76M81SM99F08) received the B.S. degree in electronics engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1975, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea, in 1977 and 1981, respectively. From April 1981 to January 1983, he worked as a postdoc with Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. He joined KAIST in 1983, where he has been working on system-on-a-chip design and verication methodology, processor, and graphics architectures for high-speed and/or low-power applications including mobile video codec. He was a visiting Professor with the University of Karsruhe in 1989, as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, visiting Professor with the University of Tokyo from January 1985 to February 1985, visiting Professor with the Technical University of Munich from July 1994 to August 1994, at the Waseda University at Kyushu Campus from 2002 to 2005, University of Auckland, New Zealand from February 2004 to February 2005, and Chuo University from July to August 2005. He is a Hynix Chair Professor at the KAIST. He is Director of the Integrated Circuit Design Education Center (IDEC) established in 1995 to promote the IC design education in Korean universities through CAD environment setup and chip fabrication services. He is Director of SoC Initiative for Ubiquity and Mobility (SoCium) Research Center established to promote academia/industry collaboration in the SoC design-related area. Dr. Kyung was a recipient of the Most Excellent Design Award, and Special Feature Award in the University Design Contest in the ASP-DAC 1997 and 1998, respectively, the Best Paper Awards in the 36th DAC held in New Orleans, LA, the 10th International Conference on Signal Processing Application and Technology (ICSPAT), Orlando, FL, in September 1999, and the 1999 International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), Austin, TX. In 2000, he received the National Medal from the Korean Government for his contribution to research and education in IC design. From 1993 to 1994, he served as Asian Representative in the International Conference on Computer-Aided De-

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10 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS

sign (ICCAD) executive committee. He was General Chair of Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference (A-SSCC) 2007, and ASP-DAC 2008. He is a member of

National Academy of Engineering Korea (NAEK) and Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST)..