Ligne-claire video encoding for power constrained mobile environments

  • Authors:

  • Siddhartha Chattopadhyay;Suchendra M. Bhandarkar;Kang Li

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Georgia, Athens, GA;University of Georgia, Athens, GA;University of Georgia, Athens, GA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Digital video playback on mobile devices is fast becoming widespread and popular. Since mobile devices are typically resource constrained in terms of network bandwidth, battery power and available screen resolution, it is often necessary to formulate special encoding techniques in order to optimize power consumption during video streaming and playback. The existing H.264 standard is popular for video encoding on mobile devices, since it results in a low-bitrate video with visual clarity that is adequate for video playback on mobile devices. However, due to the complexity of the H.264 representation, the video decoding procedure is typically computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel lossy video representation termed as Ligne-Claire (LC) video. LC videos are obtained via graphics overlay of outlines or silhouettes of objects in the video over an approximated texture video. Since the playback of LC video is typically meant for mobile devices, the visual quality of video is adequate for most mobile applications wherein the semantic content of the video can be characterized by object shapes and approximate texture information. Experimental results presented in the paper demonstrate that the proposed lossy LC video encoding scheme results in power savings of 50% or more during video playback compared to standard H.264-encoded videos, of similar video file size. In order to evaluate the visual quality of the LC video, we compare the performance of LC videos with H.264-encoded videos in the context of some typical computer vision tasks. Our results indicate that the performance of the computer vision algorithms on these videos is similar. This fact, coupled with subjective evaluation, and the resulting significant power savings, indicates that the proposed LC representation can be used effectively to encode video for power-constrained mobile devices.