Enabling multimedia using resource-constrained video processing techniques: A node-centric perspective

Successful proliferation of multimedia-enabled devices and advances in very large-scale integration (VLSI) technology has spawned new research efforts in migrating video processing applications onto ever smaller and more inexpensive devices. This article focuses on the technical challenges associated with that migration. Due to limitations in size, battery lifetime, and, ultimately, cost, mapping complex video applications onto resource-constrained systems is a very challenging proposition. To this end, we first consider a technique, region-of-interest (ROI) processing, of defining a window within a video frame and only operating on the data inside that window, ignoring the rest of the frame. By using this lossy technique, the processing requirements can be reduced by roughly 80% while the error introduced in the quality of the results is roughly 10%. The other technique is adaptive data partitioning (ADP) combined with a content-based power management algorithm. By distributing video processing among multiple processors and shutting them down when they are not needed, the energy consumed per processor can be reduced by 60% without sacrificing the performance of the underlying video-based application. Taken together, these novel techniques enable ambient multimedia systems and maintain the needed overall efficiency in video processing.